Speaker 1: What poisoning my giant city of hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: people due to industrial negligence. Robert Evans host Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 1: the podcast where we tell you everything you don't know
Speaker 1: about the very worst people in all of history. Uh.
Speaker 1: My guest today is the inimitable, the inevitable, the inimicable.
Speaker 1: Jamie Loftus is inevitable, just a natural part of life.
Speaker 1: Hi am, I am. I allowed to tell the listeners
Speaker 1: that I didn't know what we were talking about today
Speaker 1: until I think, I think you just revealed it. I
Speaker 1: did a little bit. If you know much about this
Speaker 1: particular disaster. No, no, not your call that disaster. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm glad that you first of Jamie Loftus, co
Speaker 1: host of the Bechtel Cast. Yeah, the the actress and
Speaker 1: and creative visionary behind a one woman show that's going
Speaker 1: to be in Scotland soon. Boss whom is girl? Yeah,
Speaker 1: August Baby, come out, Scotland Heads, Scotland heads, check her out. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's actually I'm I'm really glad that you guessed Chair Nobyle. Um,
Speaker 1: because I think a lot of people, having heard that intro,
Speaker 1: would have guest Chair Noble and Judging by the state
Speaker 1: of my Twitter mentions a month or so ago. I
Speaker 1: think about everybody I know was watching chair Noble. One
Speaker 1: it's because Jared's Jared was it Jared Harris? Um, it's
Speaker 1: because he's uh, sexy daddy, and people love sexy daddy's
Speaker 1: on TV. I know everybody loves a sexy dad. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I adopt children just to be sexier. Yeah, don't take
Speaker 1: care of them, don't raise them, just adopt him. Well,
Speaker 1: that sounds extremely negligent, and um, honestly, off, I love it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, I haven't seen the chair Nobile TV show yet.
Speaker 1: I am going to watch it. I just haven't have
Speaker 1: time to get into it. Um. And a lot of
Speaker 1: people have begged me to do an episode on cher Nobile,
Speaker 1: and I expect I will one of these days because
Speaker 1: it's it's a really terrible disaster. There were a lot
Speaker 1: of bastards, you know, behind it. Uh. But I think
Speaker 1: most people who watched the series but didn't do much
Speaker 1: outside reading on Chernobyl would be surprised to learn that
Speaker 1: the the immediate death toll from the disaster was quite
Speaker 1: a lot lower than I think. TV dramatizations might lead
Speaker 1: you to believe. UM, the explosion killed two people directly. UM.
Speaker 1: Another twenty nine died in the hospital in a few
Speaker 1: days following the disaster. UM. And that's it as far
Speaker 1: as a direct death toll from like the actual meltdown itself,
Speaker 1: actually kind of no big deal. Well I wouldn't say that, um,
Speaker 1: but it is, it is. It is, like the long
Speaker 1: term health consequences are a little bit harder to pin down.
Speaker 1: Can I put you on record as Chernobyl n b D. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Chernobyl n b D in fact maybe good, maybe maybe great? Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: uh no. As of like two thousand eleven, there have
Speaker 1: been a total of twenty eight deaths due to acute
Speaker 1: radiation syndrome and another fifteen fatal cases of child thyroid cancer. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: because radiation lasts a very long time, the eventual death
Speaker 1: toll from Chernobyl decades from now will probably number into
Speaker 1: the thousands. Uh. In two thousand sixteen, the World Health
Speaker 1: Organization estimated the eventual death toll of Chernobyl at around
Speaker 1: four thousand people. UM. It's pretty serious disaster, very bad, Yeah,
Speaker 1: terrible tragedy. But today we're going to talk about a disaster.
Speaker 1: The dwarfs chare Nobyl, a calamity many times deadlier than
Speaker 1: the worst nuclear disaster in human history, with longer lasting
Speaker 1: catastrophic impacts on the people who live around it. Today
Speaker 1: we are talking about the worst industrial disaster in the
Speaker 1: history of our species. Today we're talking about Bopaul India.
Speaker 1: You've heard of bow Paul, I have not. Oh good,
Speaker 1: I'm glad to hear this new disaster to mester m everybody.
Speaker 1: We all are. That's a disaster capitalism, baby, Oh, I
Speaker 1: love it. Oh, I would get I would pay thirty
Speaker 1: dollars for a T shirt that says disaster capitalism and
Speaker 1: you think too hard about how it was made? Sophie,
Speaker 1: Can we get the T shirt? People on that? What
Speaker 1: do you? What do you? What do you do that
Speaker 1: to my dream? Sophie. But I'll do it and then
Speaker 1: I'll put it in the bechtelcast store. We'll sell it
Speaker 1: with another show. Yeah, just cash that check on somebody
Speaker 1: else's account. So, uh. The question I want everybody to
Speaker 1: ask themselves sort of at the end of this episode
Speaker 1: and kind of be thinking about as we go through
Speaker 1: this story. Um, because this is something that I think
Speaker 1: about a lot, is why does every Western school kid
Speaker 1: learn the name Chernobyl, but nobody knows. Are very few
Speaker 1: people in the West have heard of bow paul Um.
Speaker 1: So let's keep that keep that one in your head
Speaker 1: as we go through this. Bopaul is a city the
Speaker 1: capital of the Indian state of Madya Pradesh. Uh It's
Speaker 1: known as the City of Lakes and is famed for
Speaker 1: being one of the greenest cities in all of India.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit like India's Portland, um, you might say,
Speaker 1: at least geographically um. In the early nineteen eighties, it
Speaker 1: was home to more than a million people. Now in
Speaker 1: the middle of the last century, India was hit with
Speaker 1: a major food crisis due to an exploding population and
Speaker 1: farmland that had still not really recovered from the damage
Speaker 1: done to it by centuries of British misrule. So India
Speaker 1: launched the Green Revolution in the early nineteen sixties with
Speaker 1: the goal of using science and technology to reform their
Speaker 1: agricultural practices and increase their crop yields. In the late sixties,
Speaker 1: the government started reaching out to foreign companies, offering them
Speaker 1: incentives to bring jobs to India, and one of the
Speaker 1: companies they approached was a Union Carbide, an American chemical
Speaker 1: giant with a name that like sounds like they're going
Speaker 1: to do to say that sounds like bad writing anytime.
Speaker 1: That's it's like, can someone just tell the people naming
Speaker 1: these companies? I guess now that like now things aren't
Speaker 1: quite as on the nose sinister now. It's just like
Speaker 1: every evil company ends with an L y. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like murder Le murder Lee is only slightly less subtle
Speaker 1: than Union Carbide. Union Carbide. Yeah. That that also sounds
Speaker 1: like a really good name for cartoon villain Union Carbide. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, yeah. We meet him early in the movie
Speaker 1: and he's like, my name's Union and you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: that sounds good. And he's like Union carbide and you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: ship ship kill us, just like all carbides do exactly.
Speaker 1: M hm. Now, Union Carbide one of their big, big
Speaker 1: They made a lot of different chemicals, but one of
Speaker 1: their big money makers was a pesticide called seven and
Speaker 1: it's spelled se v I N Are you kidding me? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's such a sinister name for a pesticide, isn't it.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't, I don't like, but it's just
Speaker 1: it's really gaudy. Yeah, yeah, seven, Like why, I don't
Speaker 1: know why. That's maybe because of the movie Seven with
Speaker 1: Brad Pitt, but it just sounds so yeah like met
Speaker 1: Ball evil, like really can't be evil anyways, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: can't be exaggerated evil. A pesticide called seven, a pesticide
Speaker 1: called seven now seven was popular in Latin American popular
Speaker 1: in Asia. Um and so since it was so popular
Speaker 1: in Asia, from like a balance sheet standpoint, having a
Speaker 1: manufacturing plant in India made a lot of sense for
Speaker 1: Union Carbide. So the company worked out in an arrangement
Speaker 1: with the Indian government where the Indian government would hold
Speaker 1: a twenty two percent steak in the Union Carbide subsidiary
Speaker 1: company that was formed to manage the plant, Union Carbide
Speaker 1: India Limited. There was a great excitement around the deal
Speaker 1: at first, and Union Carbide began to market their products
Speaker 1: using the slogan science helps build a new India, which
Speaker 1: is again so fucking sinister, Like god, yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: when people are so villainous they don't even care if
Speaker 1: they come off that way. That is they were, they
Speaker 1: were inadvertently foreshadowing. This just sounds like have you seen
Speaker 1: have you seen Paddington? To Robert no way of not
Speaker 1: Paddington to about this. It's basically a rehashing of this.
Speaker 1: It sounds like, no, it's uh, this is more Caitlin
Speaker 1: Tonto's department. But in Paddington to Hugh, Hugh Grant plays
Speaker 1: this over the top villain who sounds like you would
Speaker 1: have a pesticide called seven and say and say like quick,
Speaker 1: like a quippy villain. Yeah. Yeah, Also an incredible dance number.
Speaker 1: Well that's good. That's good, Hugh Grant, you say yes, yes.
Speaker 1: And the career defining role. Yeah, that's that's good because
Speaker 1: his career needed some definition after that garbage he put
Speaker 1: out in the nineties. I see, I can. I can
Speaker 1: rarely tell the difference between uh, Colin Firth and Hugh Grant.
Speaker 1: And that's my feminism as I understand it. Uh, if
Speaker 1: water rolls off of its back, it's Colin Firth. If
Speaker 1: you throw it in water and it floats, Okay, that's
Speaker 1: very helpful, thank you. So water bottle to test whether
Speaker 1: or not it's Colin Firth or Hugh Grant. So. Construction
Speaker 1: of the Union Carbide plant started in nineteen sixty nine. Now,
Speaker 1: the plant's purpose would be to manufacture carborrell which was
Speaker 1: the active ingredient in the popular pesticide seven, and another
Speaker 1: chemical called alid carb for a pesticide named Timmock. Both
Speaker 1: bug poisons required large amounts of a regular poison to manufacture.
Speaker 1: The key ingredient was something called methyl isocyanate, which is
Speaker 1: an inspeakably deadly gas at like room temperatures uh m
Speaker 1: I see, as we will refer to it in most
Speaker 1: of this episode. Is colorless and heavier than air. It
Speaker 1: functions similarly to fos gene gas, the deadliest poison gas
Speaker 1: of the First World War, and appropriately enough, phosgene gas
Speaker 1: is one of the byproducts of producing m I C.
Speaker 1: So they're making bug poison out of this unspeakably deadly
Speaker 1: uh poison gas critical ingredient. I am very curious about
Speaker 1: what their graphic design game is because this all sounds
Speaker 1: so sinister, and I'm wondering if it matches. You know.
Speaker 1: There there are some ads I've seen. One of them
Speaker 1: was like a Latin American ad, and it's got like
Speaker 1: a smiling um like in the background, like a smiling
Speaker 1: Mexican farmer, and all white clothes with a bushel of
Speaker 1: fruits and vegetables. In his arm, and then in the
Speaker 1: foreground you've got the seven pesticide, which has been like
Speaker 1: anthropomorphized as a tiny person beating the ship out of bugs.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's great. Okay, well, okay, didn't didn't disappoint. Yeah. Now, Initially,
Speaker 1: all the methyl ice so cianate used in the Bopaul
Speaker 1: plant was manufactured in the good old us of A.
Speaker 1: The site where the plant was constructed had only been
Speaker 1: zoned for light industry and commercial use, not for manufacturing
Speaker 1: tons and tons of poisonous chemical gas, as it was
Speaker 1: surrounded both by bodies of water and densely populated slums.
Speaker 1: But by the late nineteen seventies, financial pressure from competition
Speaker 1: led Union Carbide to decide they should start manufacturing m
Speaker 1: I C in Bopaul. They called the process of refitting
Speaker 1: their plant to manufacture the raw materials and the final
Speaker 1: product backward integration. Now, Union Carbide instituted rigorous safety procedures
Speaker 1: in order to keep the plant and the citizens of
Speaker 1: Bopaul safe. There were two sirens allowed continuous one to
Speaker 1: warn members of the public and a quieter one to
Speaker 1: announce problems to the factory workers. Within the plant itself,
Speaker 1: there were also a number of safety measures within the plant.
Speaker 1: A refrigeration unit to chill the m I C, thus
Speaker 1: condensing it into a liquid and rendering it much safer.
Speaker 1: Event gas scrubber to remove dangerous substances from the ands,
Speaker 1: industrial exhaust in a flare tower in order to burn
Speaker 1: off excess deadly gases. But the most important safety feature
Speaker 1: of the Union Carbide plant was a well trained workforce.
Speaker 1: All plant operators were required to have a college degree
Speaker 1: in either a related scientific field or in engineering. They
Speaker 1: received six months of training to ensure that they had
Speaker 1: a working understanding of not just their own specific jobs,
Speaker 1: but the jobs of everyone else on their shift. This
Speaker 1: is critical in plants working with chemicals is dangerous as
Speaker 1: m I see. Workers obviously need to understand the whole
Speaker 1: plant so they could spot potential problems or mistakes before
Speaker 1: a disaster occurs. Great. That sounds above board, leaps and
Speaker 1: bounds over there, enos very much better than the people
Speaker 1: are qualified to be doing their jobs. I like this.
Speaker 1: I actually I was looking up some of the advertising
Speaker 1: for this as well, and I found did you see
Speaker 1: the advertising campaign? That's just a gigantic white hand pouring
Speaker 1: a vial of chemicals onto. I swear to God, it's
Speaker 1: a gigantic white man's hand pouring chemicals onto India and
Speaker 1: build a new India, India. Union Carbide a hand in
Speaker 1: things to come. Gigantic. I mean, she's a hand in
Speaker 1: things to come. Come on, people, it's just it's it's
Speaker 1: it's hideous. I mean, if you're if you're listening to
Speaker 1: this podcast and a Hollywood producer, there's your intro for
Speaker 1: the mini series based on Bopaul India. Just animate all
Speaker 1: of these horrifying ads and slogans. It's like, you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's another one with the huge white man's hand
Speaker 1: pouring chemicals onto a factory in India. What do you
Speaker 1: supposed to mean? Oh, more jobs through science Hollywood, Netflix,
Speaker 1: you're just leaving money on the table if you don't
Speaker 1: produce this the Yeah, please check out the very menacing
Speaker 1: white man's hand advertising for Union Carbide. It is it
Speaker 1: is of fying. Wow, there's there's at least ten of them.
Speaker 1: He's holding a he's holding strawberries and wine, he's holding
Speaker 1: dirt in one, pouring chemicals in a lot uh one
Speaker 1: in his hands on fire, Oh cool, fingers of flame.
Speaker 1: That pierce solid rock. What the fund is wrong with
Speaker 1: these people? Why would you why? This one is wild
Speaker 1: fingers a flame that pierced solid rock. Yes, through a
Speaker 1: dramatic new process known as jet piercing. Holes can now
Speaker 1: be burned straight through solid rock. The harder the rock,
Speaker 1: the more efficient the operation. A special combination of oxygen,
Speaker 1: fuel and water does the job, and does it just
Speaker 1: the fraction of the time of the old drill attack.
Speaker 1: So there's a yeah, there's a flaming hand just punching
Speaker 1: through rock. Cool. Cool, Okay, Well these all sound like
Speaker 1: great ads that were dreamed up by coked up people
Speaker 1: who had like a gut level intuition that their company
Speaker 1: was going to do something horrible. And what year are
Speaker 1: we in right now? For We're in like the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies at this point, Like things get up and running.
Speaker 1: We're full on in Like this is a Don Draper joint.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, firehand punching through rock, got it? Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you know, I just walked through all of the
Speaker 1: kind of the safety features of the ba POL plant
Speaker 1: and on paper that's how everything worked. But you know,
Speaker 1: as I talked about earlier, increasing financial pressures led Union
Speaker 1: carbide to start cutting costs, and the easiest place to
Speaker 1: cut was basic safety procedures. In nineteen seventy six, the
Speaker 1: two trade unions that represented the plants workers sent out
Speaker 1: letters of complaint to their managers and the Indian Ministry
Speaker 1: of Labor, talking about unsafe levels of pollution within the plant.
Speaker 1: They received no response. The nineteen eighties started, and Union
Speaker 1: Carbides financial woes continued, conditions that the factory began to
Speaker 1: degrade further as wages were cut and standards for workers
Speaker 1: started dropping. Union Carbides stopped require all of their employees
Speaker 1: to have degrees. Six months of training turned into eight weeks.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty one, things had gotten bad enough that
Speaker 1: fos gene gas spewed out of a badly maintained holding
Speaker 1: tank and into the face of a worker. He ripped
Speaker 1: off his mask in a panic and died horrifically three
Speaker 1: days later. His managers yeah terrible. His managers, of course,
Speaker 1: management of the plant blamed him because he'd removed his
Speaker 1: mask after getting sprayed in the face with poison. UH.
Speaker 1: The union pointed out that the faulty valve had been
Speaker 1: responsible for the accident, and that the plant had not
Speaker 1: provided the worker with proper protective gear, so the mask
Speaker 1: would not have done much if he'd left it on
Speaker 1: his face. Plant management ignored this, of course, they does
Speaker 1: it sounds very inconvenient. Sounds very inconvenient for them. In
Speaker 1: January of nineteen eighty two, there was another false gene leak.
Speaker 1: Twenty four workers were hospitalized, but at least this time
Speaker 1: nobody died. Workers began to agitate for better safety precautions.
Speaker 1: In February of nineteen eighty two, and M I C
Speaker 1: leak injured another eighteen workers. In August of the same year,
Speaker 1: a chemical engineer suffered burns to thirty of his body
Speaker 1: from another m I C leak. Leaks continued to happen
Speaker 1: every month or so, injuring workers at a steady pace. Now,
Speaker 1: if you were a responsible corporation, you might say, boy,
Speaker 1: the monthly poison gas leaks might be a sign that
Speaker 1: something is awry with our factory, and perhaps major changes
Speaker 1: should be made. But what if you were the type
Speaker 1: of company whose mascot is a gigantic Caucasian hand, what
Speaker 1: would you what would you do if that were that
Speaker 1: were more your vibe? Well, uh, I think you would
Speaker 1: continue cutting costs uh and I think this is we're
Speaker 1: getting to one of the most fucked up crazy things
Speaker 1: of this whole story. So Union Carbide, to their credit,
Speaker 1: did make some concessions for the health and well being
Speaker 1: of their Indian employees. It provided them with twice yearly
Speaker 1: medical exams from the plant doctor, which sounds sounds great.
Speaker 1: They did some year in tests that sounds like some
Speaker 1: bare minimum stuff that never happens. It was. It was
Speaker 1: a little less than bare minimum because while they were
Speaker 1: given blood and urine tests, workers were never actually given
Speaker 1: the results of their exams. UH. Union Carbide India management
Speaker 1: put out brochures advising employees that they could develop a
Speaker 1: resistance to poison by drinking six or seven glasses of
Speaker 1: milk per day and eating a lot of fish and eggs.
Speaker 1: What milk? What is the logic behind that? Is it?
Speaker 1: It's just like I'm like a mommy thing like shut
Speaker 1: up and drink your milk and there's no way and
Speaker 1: you'll never die. By this, Union Carbide knows that the
Speaker 1: plant's not going to be there forever. They've got a
Speaker 1: couple of years more and they're gonna gradually kind of
Speaker 1: like pull all the assets out of it and shut
Speaker 1: it down, and they the unions are agitating for expensive
Speaker 1: work to make the plant safe and stop killing workers
Speaker 1: and stuff. So this was sort of a delaying tactic.
Speaker 1: We're not going to give them any money or better
Speaker 1: medical care. Tell them to drink milk again, so over
Speaker 1: the top villainous. Yeah, it's really fucked up, Like you
Speaker 1: can pick you're someone in a gigantic like money thrown thing, like,
Speaker 1: just tell them to drink milk. I don't care, and
Speaker 1: drink milk. It's amazing. Did they provide the milk? Why
Speaker 1: would you do that? No, of course not hate it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's awful. And at the same time, by the time
Speaker 1: we're through with this, you'll barely remember that because of
Speaker 1: how fucked up everything else is like this fucking story.
Speaker 1: By the end of two most of the original m
Speaker 1: I C operators had resigned workers from other union carbide
Speaker 1: plants without the proper training and experience to work with
Speaker 1: such a dangerous chemical, were brought in to manage the plant.
Speaker 1: They received fourteen days of training. That's clearly enough, jeez.
Speaker 1: Due to fears of industrial espionage, these new workers did
Speaker 1: not have access to manuals that told them how to
Speaker 1: do their job. Only the manager could access the manual,
Speaker 1: which was of course printed in English, a language not
Speaker 1: spoken by the majority of the workers. Cool. Cool, I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean it seems fair to I love a good
Speaker 1: tale of oppressing the poor, especially when it's being done
Speaker 1: by evil, wet American like milk. Oppressing the poor does
Speaker 1: a body good. That'll be funny to the three or
Speaker 1: four people who remember that old milk industry campaign. I do,
Speaker 1: I do remember it. Yeah, I'm still stuck on the
Speaker 1: milk thing. I mean, I just it's fucking wild. God,
Speaker 1: have someone punched that up. At least have someone punch
Speaker 1: up this villainy. It's it's coming in a little stale
Speaker 1: for me a little bit. Yeah. At this point, the
Speaker 1: union card by plant in Bopaul was already dangerously ill maintained,
Speaker 1: as I think we've established, But company management decided there
Speaker 1: were still more costs to be cut. They started slashing
Speaker 1: worker training even more. According to a U. C. Davis
Speaker 1: paper by Ingrid Eckerman on working conditions in the plant quote,
Speaker 1: during the training period, technicians were treated as casual workers.
Speaker 1: After the training, they were only paid an hourly rate.
Speaker 1: A technician who accepted a job at the m I
Speaker 1: C plant got a paper about receiving six months of training,
Speaker 1: but after five weeks he was asked to stop the
Speaker 1: training and to take charge as a full fledged plant operator.
Speaker 1: In the matter of promotions, individuals with little experience but
Speaker 1: with unquestioning loyalty to the bosses were invariably selected before others.
Speaker 1: A demand for extra safety precautions led to warnings that
Speaker 1: appointments could be terminated in nineteen eight three. In nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four, there were personnel reductions in order to cut costs.
Speaker 1: Workers were encouraged to take early retirement. Three hundred temporary
Speaker 1: workers were laid off and another hundred fifty permanent workers
Speaker 1: were put in a pool to be assigned to jobs
Speaker 1: as needed. The operating shifts were cut from twelve to
Speaker 1: six and maintenance shifts from six to two. So they
Speaker 1: just cut out two thirds of the maintenance shifts. Like,
Speaker 1: we don't need that on this deadly poison, right, we
Speaker 1: don't need anyone checking our work. No, they're okay, So
Speaker 1: do we know? Like what what am I trying to say?
Speaker 1: I like, are are they dodging existing labor laws? Or
Speaker 1: are the labor laws in India at this time uh,
Speaker 1: sort of allowing this to happen, or is the company
Speaker 1: having to sort of like dodge around stuff. Both of
Speaker 1: those things are simultaneously true. So they are skirting some
Speaker 1: laws and regulations, primarily about safety. Um, and they're able
Speaker 1: to get away with it because of their connections in
Speaker 1: the Indian government and because of the amount of money
Speaker 1: that that this all represents. So both of those things
Speaker 1: are true. Um. You know what else is true, Jamie?
Speaker 1: What's true? Robert? None of the sponsors of this show
Speaker 1: have contributed to an industrial disaster of the ski Can
Speaker 1: you be so sure, Robert? This is a terrible ad player.
Speaker 1: These advertisers are not guilty of any major disaster that
Speaker 1: we're currently aware of. Of course, this is always subject
Speaker 1: to change, and it's entirely possible the next ad will
Speaker 1: be a Coke Industries ad. And one of the things
Speaker 1: Coke Industry has gotten attacked for is that at their
Speaker 1: oil refining plants they were doing the same thing that
Speaker 1: Bow Paul was doing, where they were giving people screenings
Speaker 1: through levels of toxic chemicals in their blood, but not
Speaker 1: giving them the results of their blood tests, and so
Speaker 1: people died because they got sick. But Coke industries wanted
Speaker 1: to ring a little bit of extra productivity out of
Speaker 1: them before they went to get treated. Yeah, how fun.
Speaker 1: How fun? So if if the AD is for coke industries,
Speaker 1: they have in fact contributed to industrial disasters on a
Speaker 1: significant scale. But you know, Dick pills, haven't Yeah, Dick pills.
Speaker 1: Do you do brain pills? We just turned down brain
Speaker 1: We don't do brain pills. I won't do brain pills.
Speaker 1: I'm fine with dick pills. I think that's ethical, but
Speaker 1: no brain pills. We turned down almost everything, which is
Speaker 1: why we're still poor. You know, I I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't have much of a conscience. I want so brain pills. Uh,
Speaker 1: I think I love Dick pills. Dick pills, I would, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think we would want an offer for that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we should get I hope that we get some you know,
Speaker 1: dick pill offers some really any any genitalia pills were
Speaker 1: to talk any any genital related products. Yeah, I want.
Speaker 1: I wanted to be like an intersectional, inclusive Uh scary pill.
Speaker 1: I mean speaking of the milk industries ads, I wish
Speaker 1: there were just a genitalia industry that we could we
Speaker 1: could plug for big genital. Yeah, just plug the concept
Speaker 1: of genitalia that came straight down from Big Genital. You
Speaker 1: can't trust him. Yeah, b g all right, I think
Speaker 1: we put enough distance in between my terrible first segue
Speaker 1: and in the ads. Now it's time for products. We're back.
Speaker 1: We're talking about directions. Uh, but we don't need to
Speaker 1: keep talking about directions. No. That's the beautiful thing about
Speaker 1: a conversation about directions. It can end it at any time.
Speaker 1: It can end at any time, much like an direction
Speaker 1: unless you have Dick bills. Oh my own a little
Speaker 1: loved that one. Good. I I did that one for
Speaker 1: all of the uncles and also Bob Dole, who was
Speaker 1: a big listener of this podcast, huge fan of the Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's got merch. Yeah, thank you, Bobby. All right, let's
Speaker 1: let's get back into the into the tail here so uh.
Speaker 1: Chemical accidents continue to pace throughout the early eighties. In
Speaker 1: October of nineteen eighty two, an operator was burned and
Speaker 1: two workers exposed to gases during an m I C leak.
Speaker 1: In four there were numerous additional leaks of m I C,
Speaker 1: chlorine gas, fosgene gas, and other deadly poisons, often multiple
Speaker 1: poisons would leak out at the same time, which is
Speaker 1: you know, I love I love synergy, and the synergy
Speaker 1: of deadly poisons is you know, all synergy. I love
Speaker 1: chef salad of death and despair. Okay, make deadly poisons
Speaker 1: work together again. That's kind my election slogan. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: so many, I mean, yeah, any any story about like
Speaker 1: factory worker um abuse and neglect. It's just it's just
Speaker 1: the fucking worst. Yeah, it's a fucking nightmare. And this
Speaker 1: is the worst of those stories in the history of
Speaker 1: the human race. So yeah, And of course, as always,
Speaker 1: it's like because it's like, I don't know, I never
Speaker 1: I never learned about this, because even though I must
Speaker 1: have learned about like the Triangle factory fire nine million times,
Speaker 1: I've heard about Chernobyl a million times. Um so much
Speaker 1: as a race from American education or maybe I'm just stupid,
Speaker 1: but I think, no, no, no, this one, this one
Speaker 1: is not in the textbooks that we tend to get. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sure if you get like Ocean training, they talk
Speaker 1: about this motherfucker. But I intend to do By the way,
Speaker 1: oh good good, we need that for podcasting. There's a
Speaker 1: room full of poison behind you, So it's just poisonous
Speaker 1: takes thoughts um all that? No, I mean there's literal
Speaker 1: poison as in the room behind you. Where because why
Speaker 1: we can't go out on the balcony. And that's why
Speaker 1: we can't go out on the balcony. It's full of poison.
Speaker 1: I forgot. Yeah, I always want to go. Wait, don't
Speaker 1: tell me that I gained so much joy from the
Speaker 1: poison room. Wait, where is the poison room in relation?
Speaker 1: It's it's it's just just there. Why is that a
Speaker 1: poison room? Anyway? Speaking of poison rooms, let's get back
Speaker 1: to Bow Paul, India. So as we already talked about
Speaker 1: the first group to blow the whistle about the dangers
Speaker 1: of the Beau Paul Union carbide plant, where the plant
Speaker 1: workers themselves, as I already said, they were organized into
Speaker 1: two competing trade unions, which is an unusual state of
Speaker 1: affairs that existed primarily because it made life easier for
Speaker 1: the plant management. After the leak in nineteen two, one
Speaker 1: of the trade unions printed six thousand posters and put
Speaker 1: them up all around the city of bow Pall warning
Speaker 1: denizens of the dangers at their door. One union leader
Speaker 1: went on a hunger strike at the entrance of the factory.
Speaker 1: According to Eckerman's paper quote, the result was that all
Speaker 1: political and trade union meetings inside the factory were banned.
Speaker 1: One you see staff member burnt the principal union's tent
Speaker 1: in the ensuing scuffle. Several people were injured. The two
Speaker 1: trade union leaders were laid off. Meetings and processions were
Speaker 1: held throughout the city, as the plant staff regarded the
Speaker 1: plant as one of the safest ships in the modern
Speaker 1: industrial fleet. The demonstrations were considered to be a campaign
Speaker 1: by agitators wanting higher salaries and shorter working hours, not agitators.
Speaker 1: Not agitators wanting more money and a better quality of life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I guess again, so are what is the state
Speaker 1: of unions in India at this point? I mean better
Speaker 1: than the state of unions in the US and two
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, Oh good, Well, I mean that's saying practically nothing.
Speaker 1: But you know what, the world's got what three years left? Anyways,
Speaker 1: year and a half. I was thinking that in two years,
Speaker 1: I was like, I was thinking about, like, at this point,
Speaker 1: why would you follow your dreams? You know, like you
Speaker 1: might as well just like write it out I follow
Speaker 1: my short term dreams of like having enough intoxicans. That's
Speaker 1: the only way, right, Like you just had to like, uh,
Speaker 1: if you if you don't have many kids, just live
Speaker 1: fast because you can't. Like, don't go back to school now, Yeah,
Speaker 1: don't go back to school. Yeah, don't. Don't read a
Speaker 1: book instead of going to school, invest in some really
Speaker 1: good bolt cutters, one of those like five pairs that
Speaker 1: won't conduct electricity, so you can snap through like the
Speaker 1: gates of a rich person's house, even if it's like
Speaker 1: mind or electrified or something like that. You guys have
Speaker 1: the scariest advice in the entire world. I'm just saying,
Speaker 1: a better investment than school at this point is increasing
Speaker 1: your ability to do take vengeance. Every other conversation we
Speaker 1: have like you should buy a weapon. I mean, bolt
Speaker 1: cutters aren't inherently a weapon. They have a lot of
Speaker 1: you to bring a weapon on a bus to Phoenix.
Speaker 1: I was like, I'm not going to do that. Phoenix
Speaker 1: is a dangerous city. I find it to be dangerous.
Speaker 1: It's filled with Arizonans, the deadliest people in America other
Speaker 1: than Floridians and Texans and Oklahoma's. Yeah, they were fast
Speaker 1: and Louisianans. They're a very high concentration of Hooters in
Speaker 1: Phoenix as well, because I went I went to a
Speaker 1: Hooters and then across the street there was Scottish Hooters,
Speaker 1: but it went by like some other names scooters, scooters.
Speaker 1: Oh you mean like the tilted kilt. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of those in the Southwest. Yeah. We
Speaker 1: had a lot in Texas to wild yep. So with
Speaker 1: the union's hobbled, Union Carbide management was free to lay
Speaker 1: off even more experienced workers and cut even more costs
Speaker 1: in how their plant was managed. One example, the best
Speaker 1: industry practices for storing methyl isocyanate m i C was
Speaker 1: to store it in fifty two gallon drums and have
Speaker 1: like a lot of small drums rather than one gigantic
Speaker 1: storage bat. This was considered safer because it reduced the
Speaker 1: amount that could get out during an individual leak. But
Speaker 1: Union Carbide was like, all those fifty two gallon drums
Speaker 1: are gonna cost a shipload of money and it's going
Speaker 1: to take more time. Let's just put it in one
Speaker 1: gigantic container, even though that's way less safe and is
Speaker 1: explicitly what every expert on the chemical says, no, don't
Speaker 1: fucking do that. We're let's just do it anyway because
Speaker 1: it will save us some bucks. So uh. Union carbides
Speaker 1: own technical manual for m I C warned that this
Speaker 1: was literally the most dangerous way to store the substance.
Speaker 1: While small drums of the gas do not require refrigeration,
Speaker 1: it is absolutely necessary for safe bulk storage. Unfortunately, the
Speaker 1: refrigeration unit designed to do this was, according to her
Speaker 1: later report by the Indian government's chief scientists, small and ineffective.
Speaker 1: In late night, it was turned off entirely after plant
Speaker 1: managers talked with their bosses at the American headquarters of
Speaker 1: Union Carbide and determined it was unnecessary. The refrigeration unit
Speaker 1: was determined to be unnecessary because shutting it off would
Speaker 1: save money on electricity and allow them to reroute the
Speaker 1: free onto other parts of the plant and save even
Speaker 1: more money. Connecting this refrigeration unit added whole pennies to
Speaker 1: the shareholder value of Union Carbides. This is like the
Speaker 1: equivalent of just like lighting Titanic lifeboats on fire, Yeah,
Speaker 1: just cause need more room. It's like lighting those lifeboats
Speaker 1: on fire as you like do shots with the captain
Speaker 1: to convince him to get as close to that iceberg
Speaker 1: as he can. Say. Yeah, like it's like you want
Speaker 1: to throw a beer, adding taking body shots off the
Speaker 1: cap ridiculous. So Union Carbides manual for m I C
Speaker 1: did not include any guidance as to what employees might
Speaker 1: do in the event of a massive leak. Fairly little
Speaker 1: was known about the chemical, so the manual simply suggested
Speaker 1: dumping it into a spare storage tank. It noted there
Speaker 1: may be other situations not covered above. The situation will
Speaker 1: determine the appropriate action. We will learn more and more
Speaker 1: as we gain actual experience, which is a great thing
Speaker 1: to hear in the manual for a deadly chemical producing
Speaker 1: By the time, my god, love it of it, this
Speaker 1: is there's no and and I'm imagining there's no like
Speaker 1: formal regulatory body that would say oversee something like this.
Speaker 1: Are they even pretending to have any sort of regular
Speaker 1: like regulation. They're definitely pretending. Okay, well, I'm like at
Speaker 1: least show some some effort. Oh yeah, they fake it
Speaker 1: a little bit, not a whole lot, because again, like
Speaker 1: it's India and rules are a lot less strict there. Uh,
Speaker 1: but they do fake it to an extent. Um and
Speaker 1: I want to note because like I've spent a decent
Speaker 1: amount of time in India and I really love the country. Um.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of very valid criticism about how
Speaker 1: loose a lot of the rules about worker health and
Speaker 1: safety are and have been going back decades. Totally fair
Speaker 1: to hit them on that. There were also and are
Speaker 1: also a lot of people in the country who carry
Speaker 1: a lot about reforming that. And in the case of
Speaker 1: the ticking time bomb that was the Bopaul Union carbide plant,
Speaker 1: there was a heroic journalist in addition to those like
Speaker 1: a union workers who tried to blow the whistle. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: this journalists name was Raj Kumar Kaswani and he wrote
Speaker 1: for a local Hindu weekly paper called the Septak Report.
Speaker 1: And in late night two he started receiving tips about
Speaker 1: the poor maintenance and constant leaks inside the Union carbide facility.
Speaker 1: Rush Kumar began to investigate and became convinced that an
Speaker 1: apocalyptic danger awaited the city of beau Pal. In September
Speaker 1: and October, he ran a series of articles with the
Speaker 1: most heartbreaking headlines imaginable. The first article was titled save
Speaker 1: Please Save this City. The second article was titled Beau
Speaker 1: Paul on the Mouth of a Volcano, and the third
Speaker 1: was titled if you don't understand, you will be wiped
Speaker 1: out rash. Yeah, like that's you really can be more directed.
Speaker 1: A title no Buried leads with this guy. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: setting the tone. I mean, I'm glad that he did,
Speaker 1: because especially it sounds like the union workers are already
Speaker 1: out here saying this is happen. And then it's just
Speaker 1: like if the company and the culture and the local
Speaker 1: government care, you're going to die. Like seriously, not kidding,
Speaker 1: We're all about to fucking die. Please read, please, love
Speaker 1: God do something. Uh. As we all know from the
Speaker 1: last couple of years, especially nobody listened to roj Kumars. Uh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: By nine four m I C production at the Beau
Speaker 1: Paul plant was down to about a quarter of its height.
Speaker 1: Cost cutting features had reduced maintenance shifts to roughly a
Speaker 1: quarter of their necessary frequency and robbed the plant of
Speaker 1: most of its highly trained staff. Mr Parik, a former
Speaker 1: project manager at the plant, reported the whole industrial culture
Speaker 1: of union carbide at Bow Paul went down the drain.
Speaker 1: The plant was losing money. Top management decided that saving
Speaker 1: money was more important than safety. Maintenance practices became poor
Speaker 1: and things generally got sloppy. The plant didn't seem to
Speaker 1: have a few sure, and a lot of skilled people
Speaker 1: became depressed and left as a result. And this was
Speaker 1: the situation on December two when things started to go
Speaker 1: badly wrong at the plant. And how many people are
Speaker 1: working at this plant? Oh, not that many people. There's
Speaker 1: only six folks on staff. Yeah. The first sign of
Speaker 1: this was in pressure readings from the gas tanks that
Speaker 1: registered at five times the normal levels sum one day.
Speaker 1: The senior operator on duty said he did not consider
Speaker 1: this a problem. Another worker who saw the same readings
Speaker 1: half an hour later, had the same reaction. He later
Speaker 1: recalled to the New York Times there was a continual
Speaker 1: problem with instruments. Instruments often didn't work, so they didn't
Speaker 1: they didn't see like it was showing elevated levels of gases,
Speaker 1: but it kind of always did because all of the
Speaker 1: instruments were garbage, so they just didn't think of it
Speaker 1: as a problem. Now, it might have helped in this
Speaker 1: case if the Bopaul plant had enjoyed a complex computer
Speaker 1: monitoring system to check for things like gasses and This
Speaker 1: is where I and out the Union Carbide operated a second,
Speaker 1: almost identical chemical plant producing m I C in West Virginia.
Speaker 1: It was also known as the sister plant to the
Speaker 1: one in Bopaul, and that plant did in fact have
Speaker 1: a sophisticated computer monitoring system to quickly warn staff members
Speaker 1: about leaks. Meanwhile, in India, Union Carbide preferred to rely
Speaker 1: on workers to notice leaks when their eyes started a
Speaker 1: water from all the poison in the air. Oh my god, yeah,
Speaker 1: I laughter about what's coming is like the like like
Speaker 1: the anxious reaction that comes because of the horrors. But
Speaker 1: like I wonder which country the company cared about. More
Speaker 1: impossible to say, no, need to bring race into this, Jamie, Yeah, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. That was a reach and I and I
Speaker 1: can't apologize enough. At am December, two workers in the
Speaker 1: methyl isocyanate structure on FET from the control room noticed
Speaker 1: that their eyes had started to water. One operator US
Speaker 1: named Singh spotted a liquid drip and a yellowish white gas.
Speaker 1: He went to the control room at PM and told
Speaker 1: his boss that they had another M I C leak.
Speaker 1: His boss and Mr Quareshi told him that he would
Speaker 1: look into it after having his tea. Uh, this is
Speaker 1: literally Titanic, Robert not to not to, but it's like
Speaker 1: Iceberg right ahead, and he's like, okay, let me just
Speaker 1: finish my beer first. This is going to make Titanic
Speaker 1: look like a ski do crash. Well, Titanic in retrospect,
Speaker 1: like a lot of rich people died, and we can't
Speaker 1: you know, we can't fault We can't fault the ocean
Speaker 1: for claiming the rich. No, no, I'm I'm alright with
Speaker 1: that actually, but sorry, not not not to say that yet. Anyway,
Speaker 1: no one looked into the league until after am, once
Speaker 1: management had finished with their tea. And while we can
Speaker 1: and should mock management for waiting until after tea to
Speaker 1: check in a poison gas leak, I should note here
Speaker 1: that it's likely none of them would have known what
Speaker 1: to do if they had checked earlier. The positions of
Speaker 1: second and third shift maintenance supervisor had been eliminated several
Speaker 1: days before the disaster, so there was actually no one
Speaker 1: on duty whose job it was to fix this stuff.
Speaker 1: In fact, on the night of December second, there was
Speaker 1: not a single trained engineer at the Union Carbide plant
Speaker 1: in Bo Paul, so the people whose job it was
Speaker 1: to maintain the plant did not know how to maintain it.
Speaker 1: They knew nothing about M I C or fostergene, the
Speaker 1: two deadly gases stored by the ton and enormous cylinders.
Speaker 1: The supervisor was initially convinced that no leak was possible
Speaker 1: because they'd stopped production for the night. The New York
Speaker 1: Times spoke to several of these workers. Quote. M. K. Jane,
Speaker 1: an operator on duty on the night of the accident,
Speaker 1: said that he did not understand large parts of the plant.
Speaker 1: His three months of instrument training and two weeks of
Speaker 1: theoretical work taught him to operate only one of several
Speaker 1: methyl isocyanate systems. He said. If there was a problem
Speaker 1: in another M I C system, I don't know how
Speaker 1: to deal with it, said Mr Jane, a high school graduate.
Speaker 1: Raman Khan, the operator who washed the improperly sealed pipe
Speaker 1: a few hours before the accident, said, I was trained
Speaker 1: for one particular area and one particular job. I don't
Speaker 1: know about other jobs. During training, they just said, these
Speaker 1: are the valves you were supposed to turn, This is
Speaker 1: the system in which you work. Here are the instruments
Speaker 1: and what they indicate that's it. Okay, Yeah, so the whole,
Speaker 1: the whole training was done away with. Yeah, basically. So
Speaker 1: in order to talk about how the disaster started and
Speaker 1: what happened next, I'm going to quote from a National
Speaker 1: Institute of Health article on what happened because it kind
Speaker 1: of describes it mechanically. Quote. The vent gas scrubber, a
Speaker 1: safety device designed to neutralize toxic discharged from the m
Speaker 1: I C system, had been turned off three weeks prior.
Speaker 1: Apparently a faulty valve had allowed one ton of water
Speaker 1: for cleaning internal pipes to mix with forty tons of
Speaker 1: m I C. A thirty ton refrigeration unit that normally
Speaker 1: served as a safety component to cool the m I
Speaker 1: C storage tank had been drained of its coolant for
Speaker 1: use in another part of the plant. Pressure and heat
Speaker 1: from the vigorous exothermic reaction in the tank contain you
Speaker 1: to build The gas flare. Safety system was out of
Speaker 1: action and had been for three months. At around one
Speaker 1: am December third, loud rumbling reverberated around the plant as
Speaker 1: a safety valve gave way, sending a plume of m
Speaker 1: I C gas into the early morning air. Jesus Christ
Speaker 1: now it didn't kill the workers at the plant. This
Speaker 1: is not like Chernobyl. It's much worse because the gas,
Speaker 1: which was heavier than air, floated down to the slums
Speaker 1: surrounding the chemical plant and into the lungs of thousands
Speaker 1: upon thousands of sleeping citizens. The wind blew the poisonous
Speaker 1: gas as far and wide, covering an area of almost
Speaker 1: forty square kilometers. Hundreds choked to death in their sleep
Speaker 1: as their lungs literally liquefied and drowned them. Thousands more awoke, eyes, burning,
Speaker 1: mouth's frothing, driven nearly mad by a choking terror. Few
Speaker 1: of us can imagine. Nearly four thousand people died on
Speaker 1: the first night, as many people as the World Health
Speaker 1: Organization estimates will die in total from the Chernobyl disaster
Speaker 1: over the next several decades. Jesus Christ. Yeah, kind of frustrating.
Speaker 1: We don't learn about this one. It's yeah, extremely telling
Speaker 1: that we don't learn about this one. That's oh my god,
Speaker 1: four so four thousand and and the poison acts in
Speaker 1: a matter of hours. Yeah, jee Now, since m I
Speaker 1: C is twice as heavy as air, children were poisoned
Speaker 1: first and had the most trouble escaping the deadly gases,
Speaker 1: and as bad as the leak was, it should have
Speaker 1: been easy from most of the victims to escape. A
Speaker 1: wet cloth over the mouth would have acted as a
Speaker 1: crude gas mask long enough for virtually everyone affected to
Speaker 1: climb to higher ground and get above the gas. But
Speaker 1: no one in Bopal knew these facts because Union Carbide
Speaker 1: had not bothered to spend the money to inform the
Speaker 1: citizens about what they might need to do if the
Speaker 1: giant poisoned gas plant in their city ever exploded. And
Speaker 1: that wouldn't have even cost anything like barely anything to print. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you'd had to print some stuff, and yeah, you just
Speaker 1: have to I guess yeah, by one a couple of
Speaker 1: ads in a newspaper. So coral doctors were at first
Speaker 1: not even aware of what chemical people had been poisoned with,
Speaker 1: because Union Carbide had not bothered to have a little
Speaker 1: sit down with any of them either. According to an
Speaker 1: India Today report on the disaster, quote, the public siren
Speaker 1: was put on around one am, but only for a
Speaker 1: few minutes, and after that the muted siren took over.
Speaker 1: This was per Carbide procedure, which was evolved to avoid
Speaker 1: alarming the public around the factory over tiny leaks. But
Speaker 1: in the present case, it was gross negligence that the
Speaker 1: continuous siren was put off. Although it was already known
Speaker 1: by then that M I C was escaping in huge quantities,
Speaker 1: it was not until two am, one hour later, that
Speaker 1: the public siren was sounded again on full blast to
Speaker 1: alert the already terrified, injured, and dying in the city.
Speaker 1: So that's cool. That just seems aggressive at that point, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: people know something's up. Yeah, because they're dying by the hunter.
Speaker 1: Everyone they know just died. You don't need to turn
Speaker 1: on the siren now, asshole. So um, this is time
Speaker 1: for an AD plug. This is a really dark time
Speaker 1: for an AD plug. Maybe our darkest AD pivot of
Speaker 1: all time. I mean, this is just like devastating. This
Speaker 1: is so yeah, it's so crushing. Yeah, well, I mean
Speaker 1: I just I don't know. Every day I learned about
Speaker 1: something new that was just completely omitted from my education,
Speaker 1: so I could learn misinformation about the founding fathers. And
Speaker 1: it makes me angry, but you know, but you know
Speaker 1: what really comforts me in these moments of anger, Products
Speaker 1: and services. Products and services. We're back on the fucking train. Baby.
Speaker 1: All right, now some ads, we're back. We're back, and
Speaker 1: things are not I think things are not going well.
Speaker 1: Things are not going great. The alarms have been sounded
Speaker 1: after four thousand people have died. Yeah, just you know,
Speaker 1: four thousand people or so. Yeah. So in order to
Speaker 1: like kind of put together or provide a picture of
Speaker 1: exactly what was going on and what it was like
Speaker 1: to be at ground zero for this, I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote from an India Today report quote. The siren was
Speaker 1: heard by Sayed Khan as he ran away, leaving his
Speaker 1: family coughing and sputtering. By the time he returned in
Speaker 1: the morning, his father, mother, and two brothers were dead.
Speaker 1: Only a sister survived. Sasa Khan of Jayaprakesh Nagar, who
Speaker 1: had fled in blind panic, leaving his wife and four
Speaker 1: daughters to the vapors, returned to find all but two
Speaker 1: girls dead. Chiv Narrang, a machine operator at the straw
Speaker 1: products factory, lost a three month old boy, but seven
Speaker 1: of his twelve neighbors, all of whom shared a four
Speaker 1: room l shaped hut, died. Among the dead were Nathu
Speaker 1: ram Ka, the owner of the hut, his wife and
Speaker 1: two children, Kuswa died because he couldn't leave his wife's side.
Speaker 1: She had just delivered their second child a few hours earlier.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Stories like that are repeated across the
Speaker 1: city of bow Pall to thousands upon thousands of people
Speaker 1: and families. Now, the bo Pall accident was the first
Speaker 1: time that doctors saw the effective M I C gas
Speaker 1: on human beings on at any kind of scale. Those
Speaker 1: who died the first day had lungs that were as
Speaker 1: much as three times their normal weight. The autopsy team
Speaker 1: suffered gas poisoning as they cut open bodies that were
Speaker 1: essentially filled with chemical weaponry. An exact death toll for
Speaker 1: the immediate wake of the bow Pall disaster will never
Speaker 1: be known. Estimates rage as high as ten to fifteen
Speaker 1: thousand in the first few days, with another fifteen to
Speaker 1: twenty thousand premature deaths over the next twenty years. So
Speaker 1: at this point we're looking at thirty to forty thousand
Speaker 1: dead conservatively right now. Again, sometimes the death toll of
Speaker 1: chernobyl and uh just I mean uh morbid question from me,
Speaker 1: um the four thousand people who die immediately? Does that
Speaker 1: have to do? Would like range with the closeness to
Speaker 1: the or or is there any like indication of why
Speaker 1: certain people survived and others didn't? Or these are the
Speaker 1: people who you know, mostly they're asleep. They live very
Speaker 1: close to where the leak happens, so the gas hits
Speaker 1: them first, and they just choked to death on their lungs.
Speaker 1: And a lot of people, yeah, got hit and got hurt,
Speaker 1: but like got away, many of whom were still hurt
Speaker 1: enough that they died within a few days. Um. Others
Speaker 1: just suffered injuries that would kill them five, ten, fifteen
Speaker 1: years later. Um. Yeah. In the immediate wake of the disaster,
Speaker 1: Union Carbides set to work trying to avoid any blame
Speaker 1: for this calamity their incompetence and mismanagement had brought into
Speaker 1: the world. It first tried to shift the blame by
Speaker 1: blaming Union Carbide India, claiming that the plant had been
Speaker 1: built and was operated wholly by the subsidiary corporation. They
Speaker 1: also floated theories that an unknown seek extremist group had
Speaker 1: attacked the plant had caused the disaster. Then they blamed
Speaker 1: angry employees, essentially trying to shift the blame to the
Speaker 1: union workers who tried to warn them about the plants
Speaker 1: issues back in nineteen. They tried to explain an unknown
Speaker 1: seek extreme misgray, like, just blame the sieks. Yeah, let's
Speaker 1: just yeah, pretty frustrating, blame the union. So the first
Speaker 1: lawsuit against Union Carbide landed on December seventh, less than
Speaker 1: a week after the disaster. It was filed by an
Speaker 1: American attorney in the US Court. The first great piece
Speaker 1: of journalism on the disaster was published in January by
Speaker 1: The New York Times, based on dozens of interviews with
Speaker 1: plant workers, Union Carbide representatives, and members of the Indian government.
Speaker 1: They were the first paper to report on much of
Speaker 1: what I talked about today, the cost cutting, elimination of
Speaker 1: trained personnel, shut down of basic safety equipment, and failure
Speaker 1: to warn the community. Quote when you questioned in recent
Speaker 1: days about the shortcomings disclosed in the inquiry by The Times,
Speaker 1: a spokesman at the Union Carbide corporate headquarters in Danbury
Speaker 1: characterized any suggestion of the accidents causes a speculation and
Speaker 1: emphasized that Union Carbide would not contribute to that speculation. Cool. Cool, all.
Speaker 1: The spokesman went on to state responsibility for plant maintenance,
Speaker 1: hiring and training of employees, establishing levels of training and
Speaker 1: determining proper staffing levels rest with the plant management. M mmmmm,
Speaker 1: m oh, it's it's actually India's fault. It's actually India's fault.
Speaker 1: Let's let's code now. The time spoke with VP GO
Speaker 1: call the ce CEO of the Union Carbide India to
Speaker 1: try and parse out just how independent the so called
Speaker 1: subsidiary really was during his interview. They noted quote at
Speaker 1: perhaps a dozen points during a two hour interview, he
Speaker 1: read his answers into a tape recorder, saying he would
Speaker 1: inform the parent corporations Danbury headquarters of what he had said.
Speaker 1: He also made notes of some of his comments and
Speaker 1: said he would send him to Danbury for approval by
Speaker 1: Union Carbide lawyers. That doesn't sound totally independent investing. I know,
Speaker 1: it sounds totally above board. It sounds like standard practice.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it seems seems God it's legit and cool.
Speaker 1: Cannot talk about it. No, it's just so fucked up.
Speaker 1: This will not be our dark Yeah, rip roaring funnest episode.
Speaker 1: The things that you tell us, Robert, it's upset. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not great. And then we're just supposed to go
Speaker 1: home after that, you know, go home maybe you get
Speaker 1: some bolt cutters, and then they only advice you have
Speaker 1: for coping is to buy bolt cutters. Everybody could use
Speaker 1: a pair of bolt cutters. That's all I'm saying. That's
Speaker 1: all I and Werner Herzog. Now. The New York Times
Speaker 1: further notes that Union Carbide had several direct representatives on
Speaker 1: the board of Union Carbide India, including an e v
Speaker 1: P of the American company. Mr. Gokal confirmed that the
Speaker 1: Union Carbide Board of directors reviewed reports regularly from operations
Speaker 1: in their Indian subsidiary and made numerous safety decisions, such
Speaker 1: as the decision to shut down the refrigerator to save
Speaker 1: power and free on Yeah. In March of nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: the Indian government passed the Gas Leak Disaster Act, making
Speaker 1: the Indian government the only representative of victims in and
Speaker 1: outside of India. Eventually, the government reached a settlement with
Speaker 1: Union Carbide. The company took moral responsibility and paid four
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy million dollars to the Indian government. Now,
Speaker 1: this was instantly controversial. For one thing, it was based
Speaker 1: on the idea that only three thousand people had died
Speaker 1: and a hundred and two thousand people had been permanently disabled.
Speaker 1: The real figure in both cases was, of course, several
Speaker 1: times that high. The n I H notes quote upon
Speaker 1: announcing the settlement, shares of U c C rose two
Speaker 1: dollars per share, or seven percent in value. Had compensation
Speaker 1: in Bopaul been paid at the same rate that the
Speaker 1: Asbestos as victims were being awarded in U S courts
Speaker 1: by defendants, including U c C, which Mind Asbestos from
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three to nineteen eighty five, the liability would
Speaker 1: have been greater than the ten billion the company was
Speaker 1: worth and insured for in nineteen eighty four. By the
Speaker 1: end of October two thousand three, according to the Beau
Speaker 1: Paul Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation Department, compensation had been
Speaker 1: awarded to five thousand, eight hundred people for injuries received
Speaker 1: in fifteen thousand, three d and ten survivors. Of those killed.
Speaker 1: The average amount to families of the dead was two dollars.
Speaker 1: That doesn't even cover like funeral costs. But sure, and
Speaker 1: when and when things like that happened, especially, you're just
Speaker 1: like this is just like PR for them. It's not
Speaker 1: you know, it's just PR. Yeah, it's just just FTPR
Speaker 1: expense of Like, no, I think it's taken care of. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the fact that Union Carbi did not care about what
Speaker 1: had happened became even clearer UH in the immediate wake
Speaker 1: or in the weeks following the disaster. See when you
Speaker 1: killed ten thousand or so people in the space of
Speaker 1: a handful of days, it tends to be bad for business.
Speaker 1: The BUPA plant had already been slated for decommissioning. They
Speaker 1: were slowly winding down production and removing equipment, but there
Speaker 1: were still thousands upon thousands of tons of toxic waste
Speaker 1: and equally toxic pesticide ingredients to be dealt with. Prior
Speaker 1: to this disaster, Union Carbide had dumped its waist into
Speaker 1: twenty one unlined pits on the site. Now, this is
Speaker 1: fucked up by modern standards, but it should be said
Speaker 1: this was the standard practice in the US back then too.
Speaker 1: So unlike what their failure to install a computer monitoring system.
Speaker 1: We can't put that one down to Union Carbide valuing
Speaker 1: Indian lives less than American ones. However, industry wid industry
Speaker 1: wide stupidity yea UH. In nineteen seventy seven, though the
Speaker 1: company built three proper solar of operation ponds and started
Speaker 1: piping waste directly in. These ponds had a liner, but
Speaker 1: it was thin and it broke immediately, which allowed the
Speaker 1: waste to seep into the ground and eventually into the groundwater.
Speaker 1: Farmers complained that the runoff was killing their cows and
Speaker 1: their crops, and then when the disaster hit, Union Carbide
Speaker 1: abandoned the factory and all of the poison inside it.
Speaker 1: There are literally pictures of giant sacks of toxic chemicals
Speaker 1: that they left lying out, unguarded and exposed to the elements.
Speaker 1: Many of those sacks are still lying around the factory
Speaker 1: to this day. The tanks and vats filled with deadly
Speaker 1: poison weren't emptied until nineteen eighty nine. Sixty of the
Speaker 1: tons of the worst waste was finally locked up in
Speaker 1: two thousand five. The vast majority. Yeah so my head,
Speaker 1: my heart, okay, yeah, uh so after this happens is
Speaker 1: the area in fact people aren't allowed to live there
Speaker 1: or people living Oh of course not no, no, nothing,
Speaker 1: That everything was just as bad, and that people were
Speaker 1: moving in. Yeah. The next sort of these huge bags
Speaker 1: of toxic waste, almost nothing was cleaned up the factory remained.
Speaker 1: The poison seeped into the groundwater, and as you might expect,
Speaker 1: leaving all this poison around in the middle of a
Speaker 1: densely populated city has had some long term negative consequences. Yeah, shockingly,
Speaker 1: I know. That's that one really threw me for a
Speaker 1: loop to In two thousand eighteen, Atlantic writer A poor
Speaker 1: Va Manda Villi wrote a great article about this called
Speaker 1: the World's worst industrial disaster is Still Unfolding. She traveled
Speaker 1: to on a negar, a neighborhood directly across from the
Speaker 1: old chemical a plant. I'd like to read you the
Speaker 1: introduction from her article, as it does a superb job
Speaker 1: of humanizing the long term impact of all this poison.
Speaker 1: Please do From the wooden bed outside her two room house,
Speaker 1: money Be, the grand dam of Anna Nagar, has a
Speaker 1: wide lens on the devastation. Money Be's bed is less
Speaker 1: than two feet from a massive pit that you sec
Speaker 1: filled with toxic sludge, close enough to witness the damage
Speaker 1: the Ganda Pani dirty water has wrought. Right next door
Speaker 1: is fifteen year old Faiza, who didn't speak for the
Speaker 1: first five years of her life and still has heart palpitations,
Speaker 1: dizzy spells, and headaches. The young woman who grew up
Speaker 1: two doors down Taba suum now has a toddler who
Speaker 1: doesn't eat much or speak or cry and has seizures.
Speaker 1: Down the street is Obie, a spindley legged thirteen year
Speaker 1: old with black pustules all over his body, so painful
Speaker 1: and grotesque that he rarely leaves the house. Across the
Speaker 1: street from him is twelve year old Tasib, who was
Speaker 1: intellectually disabled. And then there's Najma the street sweet young
Speaker 1: woman who lost her mother to tongue cancer and now
Speaker 1: sits in front of her house all day, smiling and
Speaker 1: occasionally shouting out guttural gibberous to passer by. And then
Speaker 1: there is the house where one has fused bones in
Speaker 1: her legs and another has a hole in her heart.
Speaker 1: And are they still? Are they still? They're living? They're
Speaker 1: still living in the area Yep yep slum and its
Speaker 1: slums that are around there. This is not where either.
Speaker 1: It's a big city. There's a lot of nice parts
Speaker 1: of Beau Paul. The slums where poor people can afford
Speaker 1: to live, many of them are directly around and surrounding
Speaker 1: the plant right, And the plant is still operational. Or
Speaker 1: is it just there? It's just there, It's nobody's cleaned
Speaker 1: it up there and toxic waste like a fucking like
Speaker 1: like an abandoned amusement park that's killing people. Yep, that
Speaker 1: sounds like a horror movie. I would an abandoned amusement
Speaker 1: park that's killing people. Yeah, I didn't see that movie.
Speaker 1: It's like a state in King book. Yeah, absolutely, Okay.
Speaker 1: The current data suggests that forty four communities in India
Speaker 1: at least have had their groundwater corrupted by toxic levels
Speaker 1: of solvents from the old Union Carbide Factory or plant.
Speaker 1: Canadian researchers are in the process of conducting a long
Speaker 1: term study and mortality, birth defects, fertility can to are
Speaker 1: another ailments caused by the old plant. The study, which
Speaker 1: has involved upwards of a hundred thousand people to day,
Speaker 1: suggests that folks who were exposed to the gas or
Speaker 1: to the water near the plant have ten times the
Speaker 1: rate of cancer compared to other groups. So on a
Speaker 1: long term basis, the kids who grow up in the
Speaker 1: slums around the plant and drink the water have the
Speaker 1: same cancer risk as people who were actually gassed on
Speaker 1: the night of the disaster. Dal Chemical Company bought Union
Speaker 1: Carbide in two thousand one. They merged with DuPont in
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen. To that does sound safe, sounds like
Speaker 1: everything's going to be fine today. Dow claims that the
Speaker 1: responsibility for cleaning up the mess Union Carbide left behind
Speaker 1: lies with Union Carbide India, which is now called ever
Speaker 1: Ready Industries India. Ever Ready, for their part, blames Union
Speaker 1: Carbide and their owner Dal Chemical. Dow also regularly suggests
Speaker 1: that the state of Madhya Pradesh should be responsible for
Speaker 1: cleaning up the site. The state claims they can't afford
Speaker 1: to do that and has convinced the federal government to
Speaker 1: name Dow in a curative petition demanding one point two
Speaker 1: billion as restitution for the original inadequate settlement. On their website,
Speaker 1: DOUST touts the old Union Carbide line that a disgruntled
Speaker 1: employee caused the accident. They steadfastly refused to admit any responsibility.
Speaker 1: Quote that acquired shares of Union Carbide in two thousand one,
Speaker 1: seven years after U c I I became ever Ready
Speaker 1: Industries India Limited. Union Carbide had no assets in India
Speaker 1: at the time of the transaction with Dow down ever
Speaker 1: owned or operated the U c I L plant. Site activists,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, argue that when dowbot Union Carbide,
Speaker 1: they assumed all of the company's liabilities as well as
Speaker 1: his assets. It's unlikely that any satisfactory resolution to the
Speaker 1: case will be reached as long as Dow slash DuPont
Speaker 1: continues to have enough money for all of the lawyers.
Speaker 1: A recent Greenpeace report estimated it would cost thirty million
Speaker 1: dollars to clean up the remaining waste at the old
Speaker 1: Union Carbide plant over a period of four years. Last year,
Speaker 1: Dow DuPont made eight five billion dollars in profits. Cool, well,
Speaker 1: I mean once if thousand involved, it seems to be
Speaker 1: like an outstanding thing. I'm wanting to watch a NASCAR race.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, I'm like, really DuPont, Oh my god, yeah,
Speaker 1: big names, big names. Yeah, good good NASCAR suit that
Speaker 1: DuPont company. Oh yeah, good lord. Well good to know that,
Speaker 1: you know, a hundred years later, you know, Union Carbide alive,
Speaker 1: alive and well unlike all of their casualties. Well like
Speaker 1: thirty years later. Well no, sorry, I was looking at
Speaker 1: the company was founded in Yeah, they've been around a minute. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I was wondering too. This is again he had
Speaker 1: another morbid exercise. But uh, if you google Union carbide,
Speaker 1: I'm like, how much money do they spend trying to
Speaker 1: push those results out of the first Google page? And
Speaker 1: they managed to get the bill pall disaster is not
Speaker 1: mentioned at all until uh six results down. Cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so if you're wondering, are they still evil? Yes, well
Speaker 1: that's great. Well how you feeling a out this all, Jamie?
Speaker 1: I feel absolutely, I honestly feel sick to my stomach. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is I mean, I want to do more reading
Speaker 1: about this um and the fact that yeah, just that
Speaker 1: I can't believe that there's I mean not to you know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of false equivalence, but like, why have I
Speaker 1: seen so many documentaries about the Triangle Factory fire and
Speaker 1: nothing about like it's just it's upsetting. I mean, Triangle
Speaker 1: shirtwaist is an important one to understand for like the
Speaker 1: history of the labor movement in the US, But I
Speaker 1: think Bo Paul is just as critical because it talks
Speaker 1: about what's still going on to this day. You know,
Speaker 1: the you can tie like that horrible garment factory fire
Speaker 1: in Bangladesh that killed all those people some of the
Speaker 1: same kinds of things going on in terms of like
Speaker 1: cost cutting, and just like they don't care as much
Speaker 1: about those people, so less is done to protect them. Um,
Speaker 1: that's just kind of what happens. Well, I feel absolutely sick.
Speaker 1: How do you feel? Uh, you know, I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 1: gonna pour some more coffee in a little bit. I
Speaker 1: should have we I don't know if we've mentioned this
Speaker 1: on Mike Get You've been wearing a fuzzy bathrobe this
Speaker 1: whole time? Yeah there, Robert, do you remember that time
Speaker 1: you told me about one of the most horrifying things
Speaker 1: I've ever heard about in my one human life whilst
Speaker 1: wearing a fuzzy bathrobe? I mean I read about it
Speaker 1: whilst wearing a fuzzy bathrobe. I'm glad that you're comfortable.
Speaker 1: I we we we live in a system in which
Speaker 1: nightmares are allowed to occur on a daily basis because
Speaker 1: it's cheaper than trying to prevent them, and in a
Speaker 1: system that's sociopathic. There are two logical responses products and services,
Speaker 1: Well those are those are logical for other reasons. But
Speaker 1: the two logical responses are make yourself comfortable and buy
Speaker 1: bolt cutters. I'm actually gonna do it. Someday. There's gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna. Okay, well, yeah, no, I I feel I
Speaker 1: feel terrible, but I love your robe, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to get some cutters. You can get, you know, decent
Speaker 1: ones for cheap. It's just the really nice ones won't
Speaker 1: trigger the alarms or set off the electronics and stuff.
Speaker 1: So like if you're depending on you know, how the
Speaker 1: collapse happens. Yeah, I'm just saying, are they small? They are?
Speaker 1: They like pocket size? I can't say I've ever used any.
Speaker 1: You can get ones that are small enough to fit
Speaker 1: in a small backpack that aren't huge. Yeah. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: have a variety of sizes of bolt cutter's fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I might rhinestone handle. I might. I want to. I
Speaker 1: want to kind of shrim mine up and personalize it.
Speaker 1: The revolution should involved rhinestone bolt cutters. I feel strongly
Speaker 1: about that. I I think that, Yeah, that would be
Speaker 1: a real, real iconic thing to do. Mhmm yeah. So uh,
Speaker 1: everyone listening at home, revolt in your own ways definitely
Speaker 1: consider it a pair of bolt cutters and a fuzzy bathrobe.
Speaker 1: Um god' sorry about this one. Gang. This was this
Speaker 1: was a this was extremely heavy. Yeah, it's a lot. Yes,
Speaker 1: you want to plug your plugables, Jamie. I mean it
Speaker 1: feels just wrong at this point, but yeah, but everything does.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I guess we we only have two years
Speaker 1: to live, so I may as well. Um. Sure, you
Speaker 1: can listen to the Bechdel Cast with Caitlin and Durante
Speaker 1: and my podcast about the portrayal of women in movies
Speaker 1: every Thursday. Uh, you can go see my show Boss
Speaker 1: Home is Girl in Scotland and in London all summer long.
Speaker 1: And all that info is on my website Jamie loftus
Speaker 1: is Innocent dot com and Jamie want his help on Twitter.
Speaker 1: That's all beautiful. Well, I'm Robert Evans. You can find
Speaker 1: me on Twitter at I right okay, sometimes tweeting about
Speaker 1: bolt cutters. You can find this podcast on the internet,
Speaker 1: along with all of its sources at behind the Bastards
Speaker 1: dot com. You can find us on the Graham and
Speaker 1: the tweets at at Bastards pot. You can buy t shirts, cups,
Speaker 1: um gloves that you can use to along with your
Speaker 1: new bolt cutters at Publis dot com. Um. Uh, we
Speaker 1: don't have branded bolt cutters there yet, but I'll talk
Speaker 1: with Sophie about that. We'll see what we can do.
Speaker 1: M she's not, she's brilliant to the beautiful, beautiful, Well
Speaker 1: until next week, stay angry and buy bolt cutters. I
Speaker 1: love about