Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [60]
All the same, this alarm system was only intended to warn the crews working on the factory site. Though nearby residents could hear the alarm, none of the loudspeakers pointed outward in the direction of the bustees where thousands of potential victims were packed together. “From the moment I got there, the proximity of all those people was one of my major worries,” Warren Woomer would admit. “Every evening I would have our guards move away those setting up camp right along our fence. Sometimes some of them would even get over the wall, and we would have all the difficulty in the world getting them out. The plant had such magnetic appeal! So many people wanted to get a job there! That’s what drew them nearer and nearer.”
One day Woomer decided to intervene personally with the municipal authorities to get them to force people to “move as far away as possible” from his installations. His efforts failed. None of the authorities appeared disposed to launch another eviction operation against the Kali Grounds squatters. Woomer proposed drawing up a plan to evacuate people in case of a major incident. The very idea of such a plan drew immediate resistance from the highest level of the Madhya Pradesh government. The people of Bhopal might panic, or worse yet, leave—a possibility that Arjun Singh, the state’s chief minister, found wholly unacceptable. The elections were approaching and he needed every possible vote, no matter where it came from. The portly Omar Pasha, his electoral agent in the three bustees, was already campaigning on his behalf. Astute politician that he was, he had anticipated everything to ensure his reelection. Not only would he prevent the expulsion of his electors, but he would win their votes by offering them the most spectacular present they could ever hope to receive.
The scene that engineer Kamal Pareek imagined one day was like a clip from a horror movie. The metal in one of the pipelines had cracked, allowing a flood of methyl isocyanate to escape. Because the accident was not the kind of leak the safety equipment could contain, the ensuing tragedy was unstoppable. A deadly cloud of MIC was going to spread through the factory, then into the atmosphere. The idea for this disastrous scenario came to Pareek as he watched a train packed with passengers come to a halt on the railway line that ran between the factory and the bustees. Would it be possible for a cloud of MIC driven by the wind to hit those hundreds of poor wretches trapped in their railway cars? the engineer wanted to know. He went to Nagpur, former capital of the Central Provinces, and presented himself at India’s national meteorological headquarters. Its archives contained records of meteorological studies carried out in India’s principal cities for the last quarter of a century: temperatures, hygrometric and barometric pressures, air density, wind intensity and direction and so on. All this information was recorded on voluminous rolls of paper. After a week spent compiling data, the engineer was able to extract from this ocean a mass of information about the meteorological conditions peculiar to Bhopal. For example, in 75 percent of the cases, the winds blew from north to east at a speed of between six and twenty miles an hour. The average temperature in December was 15° C by day but only 7° C at night.
Pareek packed this paperwork in a cardboard box and dispatched it swiftly to the safety department at Union Carbide in South Charleston to have it simulated on the computer. Taking into account the meteorological conditions prevalent in Bhopal, the technicians into the U.S. would be able to tell whether or not the toxic cloud of his scenario