The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [72]
Some accounts call what happened that night an accident, but I call it an inevitability. Cost-cutting measures and overall sloppy management at the plant led to reduced staff safety training, ignored warnings about dangerous chemical storage practices, and no community warning mechanism. That night, not one of the six safety systems designed specifically to protect against a gas leak like this was functioning. Not one! You can’t have a factory storing huge amounts of toxic chemicals and expect nothing bad to happen, especially if you run the place like you just don’t care.
The factory was located in a densely populated part of the city, with small huts jam-packed full of sleeping families just meters from the factory walls. When the gas began leaking from the facility, Union Carbide staff did not notify police or warn community residents; in fact, they denied being the source of the leak for those first critical hours, during which the community members frantically ran to escape the suffocating gas and authorities scrambled to understand what was happening. Many believe that had the company admitted the leak and shared basic information, such as the importance of covering one’s face with a wet cloth, many deaths could have been avoided.
Unbelievably, today, twenty-five years after the disaster, the company still refuses to share its information on the toxic health impacts of MIC, calling it a “trade secret,” thwarting efforts to provide medical care to victims of exposure.155 To add insult to injury, the abandoned Union Carbide factory, now owned by Dow Chemical, still sits there, leaking hazardous chemicals and waste left behind in the aftermath of the disaster. On the gates local residents have painted skulls and crossbones with dollar signs for eyes and have scrawled “killer Carbide” and “The Real Face of Globalization.” Soil and water samples from around the plant, tested by Greenpeace fifteen years after the disaster, were full of heavy metals and other toxins.156 A February 2002 study found mercury, lead, and organochlorines in the breast milk of the local women.157 The children of gas-affected women are subject to a frightening array of debilitating illnesses, including retardation, gruesome birth defects, and reproductive disorders.158
Even having read a lot about that night, as soon as I arrived in Bhopal in 1992 for the first of many visits, I realized I’d underestimated the depth of the horror that occurred there. And I definitely was not expecting the many rays of strength and hope that abound among the survivors. They don’t call themselves victims, because they aren’t just sitting there taking it—they’re fighting back. In fact, a Bhopali friend, Satinath Sarangi, and I call the city the “Fight Back Capital of the World.” Two survivors, Champa Devi Shukla and Rashida Bee, were awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for outstanding courage and tenacity in the struggle for justice in Bhopal. In the award acceptance speech, Bee said proudly, “We are not expendable. We are not flowers offered at the altar of profit and power. We are dancing flames committed to conquering darkness and to challenging those who threaten the planet and the magic and mystery of life.”159
Each year, on the anniversary of the disaster, the survivors hold a commemorative protest. I was there again in 1994 for the tenth anniversary of the disaster. Poets sang ghazals about the loss of loved ones and the fight for justice. Colorful banners demanded justice and called for “No More Bhopals” anywhere on earth. Heart-wrenching photo exhibits showed large black and white images of the morning after the disaster, with dead bodies, many of them children, lining the streets awaiting identification. I saw a haunting photo of a small girl being buried, her father wiping away the soil from her face for one last look. As a parent myself, it is almost unbearable to look at that picture and allow myself to feel what that must have been like. I know that as long as we continue to rely on the toxins in, toxins