Students remember Bhopal accident with campus memorial
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Students held a memorial for the victims of the Bhopal, India chemical accident of 1984 which has often been cited as the single worst industrial accident in history. The event aimed to raise awareness of the victims who are still suffering from the disaster decades later.
Saturday was the 22nd anniversary of the incident, when 40 tons of highly toxic methyl isocyanate was released into the city of Bhopal, in the state of Madhya Pradesh, immediately killing at least 3,000 people and injuring what would eventually come to number hundreds of thousands more.
"People look at it as something that's over; they don't necessarily realize that it's still going on" sophomore Aarthi Rao, who helped to organize the memorial, said.
Rao claimed that there are continuing problems as a result of the incident because much of the industrial waste has not been removed from the environment, resulting in major health problems.
"20,000 people are still drinking contaminated water 20 years later," claimed several signs posted in front of the memorial, which consisted of drinking cups that spelled out the number 20,000.
Signs claiming "One person dies every day from injuries they sustained from the gas leak 20 years ago in Bhopal" and "50,000 people are too sick to work" surrounded the memorial itself.
Rao said that she has received mixed reactions from the student body.
"A lot of people hadn't heard of it before -- it attracted their attention," Rao said. Others were less moved, going so far as to write it off completely in comparison to other disasters such as Chernobyl.
Union Carbide Corporation, who owned just over 50 percent of the pesticide factory in Bhopal, was held responsible for the release of the poisonous gas. It was determined that a number of security redundancy failures led to the chemical reaction that forced the release of methyl isocyanate.
The student organizers are a part of a larger movement nationwide, prompted in part by the organization that sponsored the memorial, the Association for India's Development, which supports grassroots development projects in India.
"There's a huge `students for Bhopal' movement nationwide; it's accomplished a lot," Rao claimed. She added that several American universities do not allow Dow, the company that bought out Union Carbide in 1999, to have any presence on their campuses.
In 1989 Union Carbide paid $470 million in damages, but the Indian government held the money until recently. In 2004, the Indian government released $330 million, the portion that they had not already spent, to be split among the 578,000 injured victims.
Rao and other organizers are aiming to bring light to the issue of corporate responsibility in this disaster and have expressed hope that their efforts make students more conscious of this issue worldwide. Rao felt it was important for India to have the jobs that the pesticide plant created, but she wants to draw attention to the critical decision that Union Carbide made with the placement of the factory, which was situated in central Bhopal. Although the location lent itself to easy access for workers, thus helping remediate the challenges of transportation in the developing nation, Rao said was irresponsible for them to bring these hazardous chemicals into a place where people live.
"That's where corporate responsibility comes in: If you're building a plant somewhere else [other than the United States] you should still consider the health of the population around it," she said.
"We want people to realize the importance of history: Even though it was a chain of industrial safety failures, there were pre-emptive things they could have done to warn the population," she added.
Rao suggested that Union Carbide could have given basic health and safety suggestions to the people of Bhopal such as protecting their lungs by covering their faces with a wet cloth.
"But no one knew," she added.
The student organization held a Bhopal awareness week last semester. Although it was met with positive reactions, it was not well attended. Rao suggested that the challenge this presented reflects the problem itself.
"It happened in a different country, so we can easily ignore it," she said.
This time they organized the memorial so that it would not be ignored.
"It's easy to walk by things, so we wanted to do something on a bigger scale; something that you couldn't as easily ignore," Rao added.
The estimated death toll from the initial leak is often cited at 3,000. A significant number of Bhopal residents died later from related illnesses and injuries. The signs posted at the memorial site 22,000 total deaths. The BBC claims at least 18,000 were killed as a direct result of the gas leak, and Greenpeace suggests that 20,000 is a conservative estimate for these deaths.
On Dec. 3, 2004, a man was interviewed by the BBC, falsely claiming to be a Dow employee. He said that Dow had agreed to clean up the site and compensate the victims.
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