The Bhopal Disaster

Every time I joined a course about emergency response, the Bhopal case was always discussed. This is the worst industrial disaster in history. Forty tonnes of methyl isocyanate was released to the atmosphere from the pesticide plant on 3 December 1984 in Bhopal, India.

From one of the training that I joined, the cause of the accident was the wrong design of the plant. They hired a fresh graduate engineer with a very limited experience and asked him to increase the efficiency of the plant by doing some modifications. You may never heard this story anywhere else, but in the course like that, we analyzed the cause of the accident in detail.

The number of victims is incredible. Some said that at least 15,000 people were killed within days. Actually, the number is not really surprising, considering the quantity of the gas released and its toxicity. If you have hazardous substances in the form of solid, liquid and gas, then the most dangerous substance for you is the gas. It can spread anywhere in a very fast rate, depends on the concentration in the air. The higher the  concentration, the bigger the contaminated area. You can’t see the gas. Even-though a type of gas has specific color, once it dispersed in the air within a certain concentration, you may not be able to see it.

I doubt that at that time, the local government had all necessary tools to handle a big emergency situation like this. Even some big cities in Europe will have a lot of problem to handle this kind of disaster. Some people might not realize that the gas was already spread to their area. The evacuation was not done fast enough to reduce the number of victims. I am not trying to look smart by analyzing all the weaknesses that happen at that time, I am just trying to describe that it’s going to be really really difficult if we have to face that kind of situation.

In the training, we were trained to handle emergency situation. I hope that we don’t have to use the knowledge in the field to handle such a big disaster like that, never. But when any emergency situation occur at any level, we have to be always ready to handle it. You are going to be panic. Sometimes the condition is very complicated, but you have to take a quick decision on that. It is not easy. It is not knowledge that can be studied directly from the book, but it requires years of experience to be able to really master this.