Firefighters, Let’s Learn from Bhopal
HAZARDOUS MATERIALS
Please, God, permit some good to come from all the death and suffering that took place in Bhopal, India.
That is my prayer. A prayer stemming from the appalling tragedy that occurred on December 2, 1984. Let all firefighters who are poorly informed, improperly trained, disinterested in safety, and ill-equipped beware.
Place yourself in Bhopal.
You live close to a manufacturing plant. A chain link fence separates you, your family, and the rest of your community from what is inside. You have no idea what is inside, and you don’t know what methyl isocyanate is or how deadly it can be.
Aside from talking about the plant with your neighbors, there is really no way for you to know anything at all about it or about the methyl isocyanate since you cannot read and you really have no money to travel anywhere to get information or to get away from the plant—even if you had an inclination to do so.
The sign at the plant entrance reads “Union Carbide.” You know that it’s an American corporation because you helped to build the plant. However, you also know that somehow it’s partly an Indian plant as well. But what does that matter? After building the plant you could not get work, so you and your family settled outside of the plant’s fence. Very few people lived close to the plant when you first built your house, but now there are thousands.
The plant is a sign of how your government and American business cooperates to find jobs. You trust your government and the American business corporation.
Three days after waking to your neighbors’ screams you are released from a treatment center. One of the very lucky ones. You have lost your wife, three children, your parents, and nearly all your friends. But you’re alive.
People from the government have spoken to you about receiving money for what has happened; but their words can’t penetrate your memories of that awful night, a night during which you awoke in horror. Some people said that they had heard a siren. You hadn’t. For you, there had been absolutely no warning; no one to tell you what to do, where to escape to, which way to travel. It was a long time before doctors treated you. Now you must think about the future.
Now place yourself in your own community.
Can you draw any similarities between the conditions and attitudes in Bhopal with the conditions and attitudes in your community as a firefighter?
If you’ll grant me the privilege of answering this question, I do.
- A tendency to blindly trust the government to protect, inform, and be honest.
- A tendency to blindly trust industry to protect, inform, and be honest.
- A lack of training in how to recognize and cope with the hazards that surround you.
- A lack of knowledge concerning these hazards.
- A lack of proper equipment to cope with these hazards.
- An absence of a disaster plan that has been tested and provides for evacuation and instant medical attention.
Even if only some of these similarities exist, then, firefighter, beware. Do you know that very few, if any, plant personnel were seriously injured by the gas? They had the proper equipment and knew how to use it.
Should you trust the government?
Our government does not have a terribly good track record of protecting the welfare of citizens against the desires and practices of industry. It seems to require a citizens’ advocate group to threaten or actually start a court action before safety and health interests are served against a toxic substance in the environment.
Look at the condition of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The great strides that OSHA has made in the area of scientific research has been stymied by budget cutbacks, stripping the agency of technical and scientific expertise. According to a published report, “The Administration seems to be in the grip of zealots who want not to see OSHA improved, but eliminated.”
What about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)? Some of its previous administrators were facing court action for failure to serve the greatest common good before political and popular pressure forced them to step aside.
At the present time, data that may indicate that non-ionizing radiation (the radiation from microwaves, radio waves, ultraviolet waves, and infrared waves) is a potential health threat is being slowly studied. There is every indication that the government is hesitant to come to grips with this problem because then it may have to negatively regulate a segment of our nation’s industrial economy when only a relatively few people will possibly suffer from too high levels of non-ionizing radiation. These are just a few examples to support my hesitation in blindly trusting the government with our welfare.
Should you trust industry?
I strongly caution you against trusting industry to provide the safeguards and check systems to protect your welfare and the welfare of your fellow firefighters and civilians.
None of the safety systems at Bhopal’s Union Carbide plant seemed to work, and, all too frequently, this is a situation that’s to be expected, especially when there are no strong external non-vested control systems (OSHA, etc.) in place to assure that safety is maintained in all its costly forms.
CALCULATED RISK
Any structure, unless constructed of concrete and completely unfurnished, holds out some degree of fire risk. Pure risk is the unknown, when we don’t have any idea of what will happen. To lower or resolve some of these unknown factors, we establish probabilities. If we are able to determine all the probabilities in a reliable and accurate fashion, then we reduce the unknown completely and have eliminated risk. This is practically impossible in the real world because we can’t take into account the multitude of factors and variables within an environment. Therefore, there will always be the unknown or the element of risk.
A calculated risk would be when an individual decides to accept the consequences of the unknown associated with the degree of reliability of his probabilities. For example, the probability of a building experiencing a fire depends on various factors, such as the fire safe habits of its occupants, detection/ suppression systems, type of furnishings, etc. Of course, a structure housing a chemical manufacturing plant has a greater probability of incurring an incident than does, say, a hardware store. If we consider risk as an outcome that varies from what is predicted and if we can measure the consequences of that outcome, then we can decide if the risk is acceptable.
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Generally, there are four steps involved in coping with the possibility of risk:
- Discover existing risks by observation and imagination;
- Estimate the probability and seriousness of potential losses;
- Consider methods of coping with these risks;
- Evaluate the data gathered from Steps 1 through 3 and implement the decisions made.
Let’s say that the probability of something going wrong in the Bhopal plant was acceptable to Union Carbide. An attempt was then made to discover the risks and calculate the potential losses (Steps 1 and 2).
Step 3, for our purposes, has two areas of consideration: Coping with the risk by deciding not to get involved in building the plant; or coping with the risk by seeking ways to reduce losses by installing safety/check systems at critical points in the chemical manufacturing process and by taking measures to mitigate both life and property losses. This latter aspect can be either the redeeming or condemning factor for a corporation.
Step 4, as stated, involves evaluating the data provided from Steps 1 through 3 and making a decision based on this analysis. If a decision is made to accept the risk, it means that the costs involved are acceptable; inversely, if a decision is made not to accept the risk, it means that the costs involved are not acceptable.
If the costs of taking a risk are considered acceptable, a decision to act is made. Sometimes the concept of “consequence” is employed, adding a larger dimension to the thinking of those who are trying to determine if costs are acceptable. For example, consider Union Carbide’s Bhopal plant. The monetary cost of the accident is one thing, but what about the overall consequences involved? In the final analysis, Union Carbide may suffer in ways that were unimaginable when the decision to erect the plant was first made.
Trying to imagine the consequences that would result if a particular event occurs involves considering whatever is imagined in terms of the probability of it happening and its implications to the organization. If the consequences are acceptable, then a plant, a product, a process, or whatever will be approved.
This concept of gambling with odds extends well beyond chemical factories and their environs. With just as potentially serious consequences, calculated risk/cost acceptance is practiced by a majority of large corporations, businesses, and municipalities, threatening life and property by curtailing vital services.
In the early 1970s, a bright young man from a major corporation explained to a group of first level fire officers why shutting a firehouse down was “okay.”
“But,” one officer said, “if you shut the firehouse down, someone is likely to die.”
The young man flipped a few pages on a demonstration chart and answered, “Not necessarily. We have the statistics on all the lives lost at the firehouse’s first-due boxes and the response times of other nearby fire companies. It is felt that the time differential that could have been experienced if the first-due company had not arrived would not have been crucial….” Etc., etc.
“I don’t know about all those numbers and things, but I have a gut feeling that someone is going to die if that firehouse is closed.”
“It’s very expensive to operate firehouses in areas that may have needed them a hundred years ago but that don’t really represent a cost effective site today.” The young man hesitated for a moment and then continued, “Look. If you all had your way, 10 fire companies would respond to every alarm box because there just might be a time when there would be a use for 10, and if 10 didn’t respond at that particular time, someone would die. The line has to be drawn someplace, and someone has to make a decision on what is reasonable in terms of today’s realities.”
Someone did make the decision. The firehouse, deemed to be expendable, was shut down. The fire officers, some who had risked their lives to save an animal because it needed help and was alive (and life was to be valued over everything else), had been introduced to a form of calculated risk. The consequences involved if a loss of life occurred must have been considered and deemed acceptable.
II something goes wrong, sometimes the consequences involved might not be acceptable, and ways are frantically sought to make the consequences reasonable. For example, I once asked a student, “If you were contemplating manufacturing a product and felt that the consequences of something going wrong were too great to accept, what, as a businessman, would you do?”
“I wouldn’t go through with the venture. I wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt and I wouldn’t want my business to suffer.”
“But, suppose that the product that you want to manufacture is really needed,” I added. “We have to have it. If you don’t make it, someone else will.”
He thought for a moment and said, “Then I would do everything that I could to make sure nothing went wrong.”
“But you know from your probability and risk studies that there is just no way that nothing is going to go wrong.”
The student didn’t like the position that he was being put in. “I would do something to lower the risk consequences.”
“Like what?”
“I’d put the manufacturing plant in the desert.”
“But people live in the desert. They could die if something went wrong.”
“Well,” he slowly and softly answered, “it’s better than a lot of people dying.”
LEARN FROM BHOPAL
I feel that the tragedy at Bhopal holds out many lessons for all people, particularly those people who are members of the fire service.
- Don’t allow government or industry to calculate for you what is an acceptable risk in your community. You must be involved in such a decision. It is your community, your life, and your family. The people who lived around the Bhopal plant were largely illiterate, and most were unlikely to adequately understand what was involved and what was in jeopardy in erecting the plant. But you are not illiterate. You have the right not to be dictated to or to be bargained away in a corporate decision, whether it received government sanction or not. Independent, free people generally will not stand for government or industry acting in a high-handed manner. If we discover that they are involved in something that is not quite honest or right, it changes fast once the facts come to light. That means if you are determined, you can have a say in what an acceptable cost is and in the way a consequence is made more reasonable.
- You must be better equipped, trained, and prepared for today’s hazards. You must become interested in your own welfare. You can’t continue trusting government, industry, or the next guy to
- take care of you. Realize that what happened in Bhopal could happen in your community or in a neighbor’s community. Don’t adopt the “put it in the desert” attitude, especially if it really means put it in the other guy’s backyard.
- Accept the fact that products such as methyl isocyanate are and must be a part of your environment. Our modern world cannot exist without them. Perhaps one particular product can be eliminated, but another equally hazardous product will still exist. The environment is not going to get safer unless you realize that what’s in it is probably not going to go away. You must learn about your environment.
SUMMARY
The repercussions of and the reasons for the Bhopal incident are still being batted about. One year after the 2,000 victims of the gas leak have been laid to rest, THE NEW YORK TIMES quoted Zrij Shukla, the chief investigator for the Indian Central Bureau of Investigations, as saying that, “No one on the face of this earth knows for certain what happened”; but he does subscribe to the theory that water (which would cause such a disaster if mixed with methyl isocyanate) was deliberately introduced into the chemical tank.
The newspaper went on to say that “Some legal experts say that an act of sabotage—as opposed to company negligence—could reduce the parent company’s liability.”
Throughout the plant were posted signs designating hazardous areas and areas where entry was restricted. There were also separate alarm boxes for fire and gas leaks—”…but there were no alarms for the general public outside.”
Are you beginning to get a sense of the interaction between the control of hazards, money, government, industry, and the general good of society?
Again, think for yourself. Make your own decisions. Don’t let others make arbitrary decisions that will negatively influence you and threaten the community that you, as a firefighter, work so hard to protect and preserve.
