The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [73]
The culmination of the anniversary events each year is the construction of a giant papier-mâché effigy of Warren Anderson, the CEO of Union Carbide at the time of the disaster. Survivors demand that Anderson come to Bhopal and face charges for his role in the management decisions that lead to the disaster. The Indian courts have a warrant out for his arrest, which he ignores from his comfortable home in Connecticut. The year I was there, the two-story-tall effigy of Anderson resembled a villain from an old movie, in a grey suit and hat, with a sinister mustache. When evening came, thousands of people took to the streets, chanting, yelling, and marching to the gates of the Carbide factory, where they lit the effigy on fire. Disoriented by the masses of shouting people and watching huge chunks of the burning effigy break off and float over the crowded, highly combustible slum, I began to imagine what it must have been like that night in the dark and chaos and fear.
Meanwhile all year long, every year since the disaster, the local community and allies globally in the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal work to provide health care to the gas-affected and to fight for justice in Bhopal. The survivors’ demands include: a cleanup of the abandoned, leaking factory; the provision of clean drinking water, since theirs has been contaminated; long-term health care and economic and social support for those who lost family members or are unable to work due to gas-related illnesses; and justice for those responsible for the shoddy factory maintenance.160
Elsewhere, news of the Bhopal disaster made headlines internationally and got a lot of people worried, from corporate executives of other chemical companies to residents of communities living near chemicals plants. Union Carbide had a factory in Institute, West Virginia, which it had previously said was nearly identical to the Bhopal plant.161 After the Bhopal disaster, workers and residents in Institute and other chemical-industrial communities began asking questions. Which toxic chemicals was the local factory using? Were toxic emissions coming from the plant, and if so, how much? Was a Bhopal-like disaster possible elsewhere?
Then in 1985, U.S. representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Health and Environment Subcommittee, released an internal Union Carbide memo that stated that a “runaway reaction could cause a catastrophic failure of the storage tanks holding the poisonous [MIC] gas” at the West Virginia plant.162 The EPA confirmed that the Institute plant had experienced twenty-eight smaller gas leaks between 1980 and 1984.163 Understandably, people freaked out.
The Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA), now called the American Chemistry Council, responded with something they called the Responsible Care program and announced that its members were committed to a global voluntary safety program that would be self-audited and would “continuously improve their health, safety and environmental performance.”164 Based on this, CMA argued that more stringent regulations of their facilities weren’t needed. As one NGO working to increase public access to information put it, the program basically had zero measurable goals, timelines, or external validation for reducing chemical hazards and essentially said to the public: “Trust us, don’t track us.”165
The U.S. government’s response, by contrast, was surprisingly useful. In order to help residents find out what chemicals are being used and released into their communities, the feds established the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), which is a database of information about toxic chemicals releases, both via air and in waste. The TRI was created as part of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act of 1986.166 This law requires companies to report the amount and location of toxic chemicals they use in order to assist emergency workers in the case of an accident. In addition, the law requires that companies producing or using toxic chemicals above