Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [79]
In the autumn of 1983, Mukund made a decision that was to have far-reaching consequences. Ignoring his predecessor’s warning, he shut down the principal safety systems. In his view, because the factory was no longer active, these systems were no longer needed. No accident could occur in an installation that was not operating. His reasoning failed to take into account the sixty tons of methyl isocyanate sitting in the tanks. Interrupting the refrigeration of these tanks might possibly save a few hundred rupees worth of electricity a day, and possibly the same amount in freon gas. But it violated a fundamental rule laid down by Carbide’s chemists, which stipulated that methyl isocyanate must, in all circumstances, be kept at a temperature close to 0° C. In Bhopal, the temperature never drops below 15 or 20° C, even in winter. Furthermore, in order to save a few pounds of coal, the flame that burned day and night at the top of the flare was extinguished. In the event of an accident this flame would burn off any toxic gases that spilled into the atmosphere. Other pieces of essential equipment were subsequently deactivated, in particular the enormous scrubber cylinder, which was supposed to decontaminate any gas leaks in a bath of caustic soda.
There were many engineers who were unable to bear the degradation of the high-tech temple they had watched being built. By the end of 1983, half of them had left the factory. On December 13, it was time for the one who had been there the longest to go. For the man who had so often risked his life escorting trucks full of MIC from Bombay to Bhopal, the departure was both heartrending and liberating.
Before leaving his beautiful factory, Kamal Pareek wanted to show his comrades that in case of danger, the safety systems so imprudently shut down could be started up again. Like a sailor climbing to the top of his ship’s main mast to light the signal lamp, he scaled the ladder to the immense flare and relit the flame. Then he headed for the three tanks containing the methyl isocyanate and unbolted the valves that supplied the freon to the coils that kept them refrigerated. He waited for the needle of the temperature gauge to drop back down to 0° C. Turning then to K.D. Ballal, the duty engineer for the unit that night, he gave a military salute and announced, “Temperature is at zero Celcius, sir! Goodbye and good luck! Now let me run to my farewell party!”
30
The Fiancés of the Orya Bustee
Don’t cry, my friend. I’ll take you to the Bihari’s place. He already has a herd of about a hundred. He might like to take on one more.”
After Belram Mukkadam, Satish Lal, a thin, bent, good-natured little man with bulging muscles, was one of the bustee’s longest-standing occupants. He lived in the hut opposite Padmini’s family. He had left his village in Orissa to find work in the city in order to pay back the debts he had incurred for his father’s cremation. A childhood friend, who had come back to the village for the festival of Durga, had enticed him to Bhopal where he was a porter at the main train station. “Come with me,” he had said, “I’ll get you a coolie badge and you’ll buy yourself a uniform. You’ll make fifteen to twenty rupees a day.” So Satish Lal had worked at Bhopal station for thirty years. His seniority gave him a certain prestige in the porters’ union, which was led by a man from the state of Bihar who was known simply as “the Bihari.” Now Satish Lal hoped that his standing in the union would enable him to help his neighbor, Ratna Nadar, find work. Padmini’s father, along with three hundred other unskilled workers, had been laid off by Carbide.
“You never actually see the Bihari,” Satish Lal explained. “No one even knows where he crashes. He’s a gang leader. He couldn’t give a damn whether it’s you or Indira Gandhi carrying the luggage along the platforms, just so long as every evening you