Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [55]
“At Institute,” the Indian engineer would say, “the posters of which the management seemed most proud were not graphs tracking the rise of Sevin sales, but safety awards the company’s various factories throughout the world had won.”
21
The First Deadly Drops from the “Beautiful Plant”
No plaque commemorates the day when the Titanic was launched with a bottle of champagne before plowing through the waves for the very first time. Nor does any history book make reference to May 4, 1980, the date that the first factory exported from the West to make pesticides using methyl isocyanate began production. Yet for the men who had built it, that day was “cause for jubilation” as one of them would later say. Thirteen years after Eduardo Muñoz’s gray Jaguar had first pulled up to the Kali Grounds, a dream was coming true.
With speeches, the handing out of gifts, garlands and sweets, the company with the blue-and-white logo had assembled several hundred guests under multicolored shamianas to mark the occasion. Dignitaries, ministers, senior civil servants, directors of the company, personnel from the various units— ranging from the foreman to the humblest operator—stood together at the foot of this remarkable structure. The engineers, both American and Indian, made no secret of their delight and relief at having surmounted the obstacles of a long and difficult process.
The new CEO of Union Carbide had come over from the United States especially for the event. Tall, athletic-looking, with a white plastic safety helmet atop his thick gray hair, Warren Anderson towered above the assembly. The son of a humble Swedish carpenter who had immigrated to Brooklyn, at fifty-nine he epitomized the fulfillment of the American dream. Equipped with a degree in chemistry and another in law, in thirty-five years he had climbed the ladder to the top of the world’s third largest chemical giant. The empire he now ran comprised seven hundred plants employing 117,000 people in thirty-eight countries. For this passionate fisherman who loved gardening at his Connecticut home, the birth of the Bhopal plant was a decisive step toward his life’s principal objective. Anderson wanted to turn Union Carbide into a company with a human face, a firm in which respect for moral values would carry as much weight as the rise of its shares on the stock market. Thanks to the Sevin that the Carbide teams were going to manufacture here, tens of thousands of peasants could protect their families from the ancestral curse of starvation. With a garland of marigolds around his neck, Warren Anderson had every reason to be proud and happy. This plant was a triumphant step in his remarkable career.
Getting the installation up and running had involved three challenging months of intensive preparation. Finding and training technicians in the heart of India who could cope with any emergency had been no easy matter. There were eighty entries on the list of possible problems, many of them extremely serious.
“You don’t launch such a complex plant like you turn the ignition key in a car,” Pareek would explain. “We were dealing with a kind of metal dinosaur, complete with its bad temper, its whims, its weaknesses and its birth deformities. Waking up a monster like that and bringing it to life, with its hundreds of miles of piping, its thousands of valves, joints, pumps, reactors, tanks and instruments was a task worthy of the building of the pyramids.”
It began with a rigorous check of the sealing of all circuits. The pipework was flushed repeatedly with nitrogen. To detect any leaks in the connecting joints, safety valves, pressure gauges and sluices were smeared with a soapy coating. The smallest bubble alerted the operators. Next, one by one, all the hundreds of bolts that held together the various pieces of equipment had to be tightened. Once the system was determined to be functioning correctly, the engineers began heating up the two gases, which, when brought together, would produce methyl isocyanate. These two components