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COPYRIGHT 2001 Society for the Advancement of Education
ON THE NIGHT OF DEC. 2, 1984, a storage tank at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, owned in part by the U.S.-based Union Carbide corporation, burst open, sending a cloud of poisonous methyl isocyanate gas toward the Jayaprakash Nagar shantytown that bordered the plant, and from there on to the rest of the city. "Slowly, the people of Bhopal in India's Hindi-speaking heartland began to awaken to horror and death," wrote former New York Times correspondent Sanjoy Hazarika in Bhopal: The Lessons of a Tragedy. "The city began to cough, to choke and heave, as tens of thousands woke to a suffocating, acrid white-yellow mist.... Then the panic began as people saw husbands, wives, parents and children struck down--gasping for breath, clutching at burning, hurting eyes and chests, frothing at the mouth ... and then choking on their own vomit and blood." The accident would claim more than 6,000 lives within a week and over 16,000 to date, going down in history as one of the world's worst environmental disasters.
Due to a globalized economy, developing countries are trying to cope with thousands of hazardous industrial chemicals they did not invent and that they have little capacity to regulate adequately. Although the chemicals have a range of important economic uses, Bhopal shows the Faustian bargain they often represent.
The sole silver lining to the tragedy was the international spotlight it placed on chemical hazards and the multinational companies sometimes implicated in generating them. Sparked by the horror of Bhopal and other industrial catastrophes, the world community has made some progress over the last few decades in crafting international miles to govern the commerce in hazardous wastes, products, and industries. Nevertheless, gaping holes remain in the global safety net.
A few years after Bhopal, attention was again focused on international toxic threats when a string of high-profile attempts to export hazardous waste received widespread publicity. Waste disposal costs were soaring at that time in many industrial countries in response to tighter regulations as well as shortages of landfill capacity, prompting several efforts to ship waste to poor developing nations desperate for cash.
In one notorious incident, Philadelphia decided to solve a problem it was having by loading toxic ash from its municipal incinerators onto a ship called the Khian Sea, which set sail in August, 1986, searching for someone to take the waste. The strategy backfired, however. The ship initially toured the Caribbean for a year and a half trying to find a place willing to accept its load. It finally dumped some of the wastes on a Haitian beach, provoking an uproar. It pulled up anchor once again, and after touring five continents and changing its name three times, the ship finally discharged the rest of its load in an undisclosed location in late 1988, according to its owners. Greenpeace, which has played a leading role in monitoring and exposing the waste trade, suspects that the ash was eventually dumped in the Indian Ocean in November, 1988.
That same year, the small Nigerian fishing village of Koko found itself in the international spotlight when 8,000 drums of highly toxic waste--including methyl melamine, dimethyl formaldehyde, ethylacetate formaldehyde, and about 150 tons of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)--near the home of villager Sunday Nana began leaking. Visitors to the site described drums "popping from the sun" and smoking, while acrid fumes reportedly engulfed the village, but the villagers were ignorant of the dangers. "The odor comes to my compound. It is everywhere," Nana told the African Concord, a weekly Nigerian newspaper. "But, to be sincere, it has not worried my health. I even walk in some places with bare feet. My children do the same."
An Italian waste disposal firm was eventually held responsible, and the waste was returned to Italy, but the damage had already been done. Many of the Nigerian workers who helped remove the waste were hospitalized with severe chemical burns, nausea, vomiting of blood, and partial paralysis,...
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