Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (19 page)

The envelope bore the stamp of the Indian Revenue Service. It contained the government’s official tribute to the man who,
for nine years, had been fighting to give Indian agriculture the means to defend itself against the microscopic hordes that
ravaged its crops. Eduardo Muñoz started when he read the letter inside the envelope. Becoming a tax payer in the Indian republic
was not exactly one of his greatest aspirations, especially when, as the fiscal services informed him, he owed almost a 100
percent tax on his salary. He decided to pack his bags.

“Leaving India after all those thrilling years was heartbreaking,” Muñoz would recount. “But I left feeling confident. The
Indian government had confirmed that Carbide was authorized to make all the ingredients for the production of Sevin on the
Bhopal site. The document was numbered ‘C/11/409/75.’ After a long and difficult struggle, my beautiful plant was soon, in
the words of our advertising slogan, to bring the people of India, ‘the promise of a bright future.’ ”

Muñoz’s optimism was, at the very least, ill founded. He was probably not aware that the people of the Kali Grounds’ bustees
had made their first stand against the harmful effects of his beautiful plant. The state of the country he was leaving was
even more worrisome. India was once again suffering from drought. All through the month of June, millions of men, women and
children watched the sky for the first signs of the monsoon. Usually, it begins with a few days of buffeting wind. Then, suddenly,
the sky darkens. Huge clouds roll in upon each other, scudding along at a fantastic rate. Other clouds succeed them, enormous,
as if trimmed with gold. A few moments later, a mighty gust of wind brings a hurricane of dust. Finally a new bank of black
clouds plunges the sky into darkness, an interminable roll of thunder rends the air, and the monsoon has begun. Agni, the
fire god of the Vedas, protector of humanity and the hearth, hurls his thunderbolts. The great warm drops turn into cataracts
of water. Children throw themselves, stark naked, shrieking for joy, into the deluge. Men are exultant and, under the verandas,
women sing hymns of thanksgiving.

That year, however, in several regions, water, life and rebirth failed to keep their appointment. Their seedlings were parched
and, in the stranglehold of debt, millions of ruined peasants had been unable to buy fertilizers or pesticides. In 1976, the
sales figures for Sevin had dropped by half. Another severe blow after the drought of the previous year.

Nonetheless a pleasant surprise awaited Eduardo Muñoz on his return to New York. In recognition of his faithful services,
the company had made him president of the international division of agricultural products. The appointment ceremony took place
at the new head office Carbide had just opened after selling its Park Avenue headquarters to Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust
Bank. A decision that so distressed the municipal government that the governor of New York, Hugh Carey, and two senators had
tried to dissuade Bill Sneath from moving the prestigious multinational out of Manhattan. They offered him subsidies and tax
shelters. In ten years the city had lost the headquarters of forty-four of the largest American companies and with them some
five hundred thousand jobs. All the promises in the world could not persuade Carbide’s CEO to change his mind. He had systematically
enumerated the disadvantages of New York, a city that both he and his colleagues judged to be overpopulated, expensive and
unsafe. Moreover, standards of education were execrable, transportation was inadequate and taxes were exorbitant. The company
had chosen, instead, a particularly imposing site set in the middle of a hundred-acre estate that was home to deer and other
wildlife. It was situated near Danbury, a charming little town in Connecticut whose hat factory had been supplying sheriffs,
senators, gangsters and America’s middle class for two centuries. The new headquarters were shaped in the form of an airport
terminal with satellite wings, underground parking, auditoriums, lecture rooms, libraries, a bank, five restaurants, a fitness
center, a hospital, a hairdresser, a gift shop, a newspaper stand, a travel agent and car rental, a television studio, a printer,
an information center, acres of air-conditioned offices and even a one-and-a-quarter-mile jogging track. All the evidence
suggested that the proud manufacturers of methyl isocyanate had found a headquarters to suit the company’s renown, importance
and ambitions for the planet. It was said to have cost a mere eight hundred million dollars.

In the peaceful suburbs of West Virginia, in the vicinity of the Institute’s industrial site, the smell was an unfamiliar
one. It was not MIC’s boiled cabbage, but the aroma of the small, fiery, red chilies so essential to spicy Indian cooking.
“They rustled up their food in the rooms we’d rented for them,” engineer Warren Woomer would explain. On his return from India,
he had been assigned to supervise the twenty or so Indian technicians and engineers sent over by the Bhopal factory. At the
end of 1978, they were undergoing a six-month intensive training period in the various units of the American plant. Woomer
remembered the amazement of the enthusiastic group as they discovered America. “The Indian government had only authorized
them to bring five hundred dollars per person, but you can’t begin to imagine what an Indian can do with five hundred dollars!
In the evenings and at weekends they would descend upon the local camera or electronics shops like locusts and set about haggling
Oriental-style, extracting astronomical reductions that we Americans would never have managed to get.”

But the trainees from Bhopal had not come halfway around the world to shop. For each one of them Woomer had prepared a rigorous
work program designed to train them for the imminent launch of their factory. “It was an invaluable experience,” said Kamal
Pareek, “even if our factory was only a child’s toy compared with the Institute monster that, day and night, went on producing
seven times more Sevin than ours would ever make.” Realizing that a ship of a hundred tons poses the same navigational and
maintenance problems as a fifty-thousand-ton battleship, Woomer assigned each visitor to the department of their specialty,
whether it was handling gases, working the reactors, operating electrical circuits and control systems, producing MIC, maintaining
and repairing the installations, manufacturing phosgene, formulating Sevin, preventing corrosion, gestating toxic waste, protecting
the environment or even running the company. With on-site instruction sessions, audio-visual shows, training periods in laboratories,
and visits to the equipment suppliers and manufacturers, Woomer and his team made every effort to bring about what the American
engineer called “an appropriate transfer of knowledge.” Each visitor was instructed to keep detailed notes on what he learned,
so that when he returned to Bhopal he would be able to compile an instruction manual for his fellow employees.

One of the most significant transfers of knowledge from which the Indian trainees would benefit was not technical in nature;
it was a message of a rather different order. In a curious doctrine that combined realism with what could be read as cynicism,
the company’s managers had defined the principles of a methodology they called “Corporate Safety.” “Human beings are our most
precious asset,” affirmed the preamble to the doctrine’s manifesto, “and their health and safety are therefore our number
one priority.” Some of Carbide’s own employees saw more than a little tension, if not hypocrisy, in such a declaration.

“How could we not enthusiastically applaud such a profession of faith,” Pareek would ask, “when we were responsible for assuring
the safety of the first plant to produce methyl isocyanate outside America?”

Carbide’s manifesto set down certain truths, the first being that “all accidents are avoidable provided the measures necessary
to avoid them are defined and implemented.” But it was on another more subtle argument that the multinational’s management
depended to impress upon their visitors the importance of safety. The formula they came up with was simple: “Good safety and
good accident prevention practices are good business.”

“At Institute, Union Carbide’s real emblem was not the blue-and-white logo, but a green triangle inscribed with the words
‘
SAFETY FIRST
,’ ” stated Kamal Pareek, the future assistant manager for safety at the Bhopal factory.

This obsession with safety manifested itself primarily through the study of a voluminous four-hundred-page manual outlining
in minute detail the instructions for emergency procedures to be carried out in case of an accident. It contained information
on how to keep personnel continuously informed, on the constant checking of all apparatus, regular practices for safety crews
and equipment, as well as the immediate identification of toxic agents, evacuation procedures and a thousand other extreme
situations.

“At Institute,” the Indian engineer would say, “the posters of which the management seemed most proud were not graphs tracking
the rise of Sevin sales, but safety awards the company’s various factories throughout the world had won.”

N
o plaque commemorates the day when the
Titanic
was launched with a bottle of champagne before plowing through the waves for the very first time. Nor does any history book
make reference to May 4, 1980, the date that the first factory exported from the West to make pesticides using methyl isocyanate
began production. Yet for the men who had built it, that day was “cause for jubilation” as one of them would later say. Thirteen
years after Eduardo Muñoz’s gray Jaguar had first pulled up to the Kali Grounds, a dream was coming true.

With speeches, the handing out of gifts, garlands and sweets, the company with the blue-and-white logo had assembled several
hundred guests under multicolored shamianas to mark the occasion. Dignitaries, ministers, senior civil servants, directors
of the company, personnel from the various units— ranging from the foreman to the humblest operator—stood together at the
foot of this remarkable structure. The engineers, both American and Indian, made no secret of their delight and relief at
having surmounted the obstacles of a long and difficult process.

The new CEO of Union Carbide had come over from the United States especially for the event. Tall, athletic-looking, with a
white plastic safety helmet atop his thick gray hair, Warren Anderson towered above the assembly. The son of a humble Swedish
carpenter who had immigrated to Brooklyn, at fifty-nine he epitomized the fulfillment of the American dream. Equipped with
a degree in chemistry and another in law, in thirty-five years he had climbed the ladder to the top of the world’s third largest
chemical giant. The empire he now ran comprised seven hundred plants employing 117,000 people in thirty-eight countries. For
this passionate fisherman who loved gardening at his Connecticut home, the birth of the Bhopal plant was a decisive step toward
his life’s principal objective. Anderson wanted to turn Union Carbide into a company with a human face, a firm in which respect
for moral values would carry as much weight as the rise of its shares on the stock market. Thanks to the Sevin that the Carbide
teams were going to manufacture here, tens of thousands of peasants could protect their families from the ancestral curse
of starvation. With a garland of marigolds around his neck, Warren Anderson had every reason to be proud and happy. This plant
was a triumphant step in his remarkable career.

Getting the installation up and running had involved three challenging months of intensive preparation. Finding and training
technicians in the heart of India who could cope with any emergency had been no easy matter. There were eighty entries on
the list of possible problems, many of them extremely serious.

“You don’t launch such a complex plant like you turn the ignition key in a car,” Pareek would explain. “We were dealing with
a kind of metal dinosaur, complete with its bad temper, its whims, its weaknesses and its birth deformities. Waking up a monster
like that and bringing it to life, with its hundreds of miles of piping, its thousands of valves, joints, pumps, reactors,
tanks and instruments was a task worthy of the building of the pyramids.”