Cold Open

It’s December 3rd, 1984 on a cold night in Bhopal, a city in central India.

In a tiny, ramshackle house, a young mother rocks her baby to sleep. She’s exhausted. As she hums a lullaby, she prays her husband won’t wake the baby when he gets home from work.

He’s a packer at the Union Carbide pesticide factory. The walls of the compound are just a few hundred yards from their home. If she stands on the roof she can see the men at work on the metal gantries above the forest of pipework and tanks.

Finally, her son drifts off to sleep. And gently, the young woman lowers him to the sleeping mat on the floor and lies down beside him. The room is cold. So she draws the baby closer and starts to drift off herself. But just as she closes her eyes, the baby stirs. She ignores him at first, hoping he’ll drift off again. But then she realizes, her baby isn’t crying. He’s choking.

Her eyes bolt open. Her son is frothing at the mouth. She snatches him up as he coughs, his whole body shaking.

It takes her a moment to notice the ghostly pale mist rolling across the floor and filling the room.

Then she tastes it: poison. It sears her mouth, her nose, her throat. She knows she has to get out. Holding her baby, she stumbles out of her home and into the alleyway.

But the haze is even thicker here. A neighbor staggers past her, vomiting green bile. Someone from the crowd shouts: “It’s coming from the factory!” The young woman stares, her thoughts racing to her husband. Then a stranger grabs her hand. “Run!”

She is pulled into a torrent of people flooding down the street. Animals, wild with panic, charge past, desperate to escape the toxic haze. Some in the crowd can’t keep up and fall in the stampede, their despairing faces lost in the crush. Others convulse in agony, their bodies shutting down as the poison takes hold. 

By daybreak, the streets of this slum will be carpeted with thousands of bodies. But the suffering of the survivors will continue long after the gas has cleared. They will face a future scarred by cancer, disease, stillbirths and miscarriages. And they will be tortured by questions about what truly happened that night, what led to the disaster, and who were to blame for the toxic cloud that destroyed the community on December 3rd, 1984. 

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world. 

Today is December 3rd, 1984: The Bhopal Disaster.

Act One: On The Brink

It’s 1969, 15 years before the disaster at Bhopal. 

A skinny teenage boy with a pencil thin moustache struggles through a large crowd outside the Union Carbide offices. There’s excitement in the air. The wealthy American corporation has chosen this city for its newest factory. Union Carbide promises good jobs and high salaries for its workers. The skinny teenager hopes to be one of their first hires.

This site in north Bhopal will be Union Carbide’s 14th chemical plant in the country. It’s all part of what the Indian government calls its “green revolution”. Since gaining independence from the British in 1946, India’s population has grown by 50%. But droughts and poor harvests have led to repeated famines. If the country is to feed itself in the future, then the way it farms has to change. So throughout the 1960s, the government promoted new methods to drive up crop yields using modern machinery and pesticides.

Now, in 1969, the Indian government is thrilled to welcome Union Carbide to Bhopal. Their new factory, which is run through a subsidiary, will import raw materials from America, process them into pesticides and distribute them all across the country. Union Carbide has promised to employ up to one thousand lucky locals.

Which is why hundreds of men have descended on the Union Carbide offices today, including the skinny teenage boy with the pencil thin moustache. He elbows his way through the mass of bodies, ducking under armpits, scrambling under legs. He’s friends with one of the men at the gate. He just has to reach the front, to catch his eye. 

The boy doesn’t want to go back to hauling sacks of wheat for a pittance, or selling chai on the streets. He wants to work for the Americans. So with a final push, the boy shoves his way to the front of the crowd. He spots his friend on the other side of the gate and calls out to him. His friend turns and flashes him a reassuring smile. 

The teenage boy with the pencil moustache will be one of the lucky ones. He'll join a thousand other workmen at the new plant. The men will be proud of their work and the prestige it gives them.

But as the years go by, the American parent company will grow unhappy with the factory in Bhopal. The process of making pesticides will be far more expensive, and time consuming, than Union Carbide anticipated. 

As a result, the company will make a fateful decision, one that will decide the future of the plant and change the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

***

It’s September 1982.

31-year-old journalist Rajkumar Keswani sits at his desk in the offices of the local weekly newspaper in Bhopal. He flicks through the pages of his article one last time, his fingers greasy with sweat and ink. Every detail has to be right. He can’t afford a slip-up. What he has to say is too important. 

Keswani has been working on this story for months. His friend, Mohammad Ashraf, worked at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. One day, he was performing a routine maintenance job when he was sprayed with a dangerous chemical: phosgene. Mohammad panicked and took off his gas mask. 72 hours later he was dead. 

Phosgene is highly toxic - it was used as a weapon by the Germans in the First World War - but Union Carbide needs it at the factory in Bhopal. It's used to produce a gas known as MIC, a crucial ingredient in the pesticide they sell to farmers but it's just as toxic as its precursor Phosgene. Before 1980, they imported MIC readymade from America but following a review of the business, Union Carbide made the decision to move production of MIC to Bhopal.

After Mohammad’s death, Keswani began investigating the plant. Sources there told him that the plant was losing money, and that to cut costs, Union Carbide was making decisions that put the safety of workers at risk.

After nine months of nailing down the facts, his article is finally ready for press. Keswani reads it over just one last time. His newspaper is a small local publication - only two thousand people read it each week. But he knows if he gets this right, there’s a chance his story could gain national or even international attention; and potentially save lives.

On September 26th, 1982, Keswani publishes his article, titled “Please Save this City”. But Union Carbine ignores his story, and so does the Indian Government. Still, Keswani does not give up. He spends the next two years digging deeper into the story. He uncovers and reveals staggering safety lapses at the plant. And he begs the authorities to intervene. But no one listens.  

Finally, in the summer of 1984, Keswani publishes one last article, one final warning. The ominous headline predicts the tragedy to come: “Bhopal on the Brink of a Disaster.”

Act Two: Out of Contro

It’s December 3rd, 1984, just after midnight. 

In the control room of the Union Carbide chemical factory in Bhopal, the phone rings.

Suman Dey, a 26-year-old night shift supervisor, leans forward in his chair and picks up the receiver. It’s one of the engineers from the plant. He tells Suman they’ve detected a leak by one of the storage tanks. But this isn’t the first time something like this has happened; it’s a running joke among workers that they’re used as human gas detectors.

Suman gets up to check the readings. A wall of sickly green metal cabinets dominates the room. It’s studded with dials and indicators - and from here, operators can monitor the performance of the entire plant.

Suman checks the pressure and temperature gauges for the tanks. He tells the man on the phone they all look normal. Then he hangs up, returning to his chair, and to his conversation with another operator.

But then the phone rings again. It’s the same engineer, but he sounds even more worried. He asks Suman to check the dials one more time. Suman sighs and gets up from his chair again. This time, what he sees makes his eyes go wide. The pressure gauge for tank 610 has shot up from one end of the scale to the other. Suman thinks it must be a mistake. But he also knows that the only way to be sure is to inspect the tanks himself. He leaves the other technician in charge, and hurries out into the compound.

Suman is proud of his job here, even if the factory has seen better days. Despite the endless rounds of cost-cutting layoffs and redundancies, the plant hasn’t made Union Carbide any money in years. Even after the forced production slowdown, the plant still makes more chemicals than it can sell.

Suman knows this is a recipe for disaster. MIC is poisonous and volatile. It has to be kept cool and the regulations say no storage tank should ever be more than half full. Since late October, though, one of the MIC storage tanks has been almost three quarters full. The workers have tried everything to empty the tank. But there’s a fault somewhere. And the engineers haven’t been able to pump it out. So for weeks, 42 tons of toxic MIC has lain buried under the earth, in a malfunctioning storage tank in a crumbling, undermanned factory.

As soon as he steps outside, Suman smells the sharp odor of the gas. His eyes begin to water. And as he walks the 100 feet from the control room to the storage tanks, he realizes something is very wrong.

The tanks are buried under six inches of solid concrete. But Suman can feel heat radiating up through his shoes. Pipes begin to shake and hiss. Frightened, he turns back. As he sprints toward the control room, Suman hears the crack of breaking concrete behind him.

Once in the control room, Suman desperately tries to avert disaster. But the plant’s safety features are either offline for maintenance, malfunctioning or simply incapable of coping with a leak of this size. 

Soon, a plume of deadly white vapor rises into the air above the factory. Swept along by the wind, it tumbles down through the night sky toward the streets of Bhopal.

In the first hours of the disaster, at least two thousand people will perish in the streets around the factory. The gas, heavier than air, will sink close to the ground - affecting children most of all. By the end of the first week, the total death toll will push toward 10,000. And as the weeks turn into months and then years, that number will only grow.

And even those that live are not spared. Some will go blind, others will lose their minds or their memories. Many will develop cancer. Hearts and lungs will be permanently scarred. Infant mortality will soar and the rate of stillbirth will triple. 

The toxic MIC gas from the Union Carbide factory will clear in a night. But the fallout of the Bhopal disaster will continue for decades.

Act Three: The Settlement

It’s February 1989, just over four years since the Bhopal Disaster.

A young mother sweeps the floor of her small home. Her five year old son dodges around her, pulling a toy car along by a string. His giggle, though, stop, and something catches in his throat and he breaks into a hacking cough. His mother drops what she’s doing to comfort him.

This is a daily ritual for the young mother and her son, and it has been ever since the mist crept into their home some four years ago. As she goes to fetch him water, she tries to remind herself that she and her son are among the lucky ones; the survivors of the Bhopal Disaster.  

She glances at the door. Her husband, the young man with the pencil moustache, will be home from work soon. The factory is long gone. These days, he works at the market. He still has the moustache, but he’s not as skinny, or as young, as he once was.

She comforts her son, and wonders if her husband has heard the news. Earlier in the day, a neighbor told her that the American company has finally agreed to pay for what happened here. Every survivor will receive as much as 25,000 rupees. The families of those who died will get even more - up to 50,000 rupees, more money than most people here will ever know.

The young woman helps her son drink some water, stroking his back, willing the cough away. She knows the money will not fix his lungs or chase off the nightmares they both still have, of the running and the screaming or the fog that obliterated the sky.

The total number of victims of the Bhopal Disaster will never be confirmed, but from a population of less than a million, it will be estimated that 500,000 people in the city were poisoned by the gas. Years after the fact, the disaster will continue to find victims as families drink water still laced with the chemical, and children play in the toxic abandoned ruins of the Union Carbide factory.

The $470 million out-of-court settlement between the American company and the Indian government will not be the end of legal proceedings. Survivor groups, outraged by the tiny compensation, will continue to press their case in courts in India and America for years to come - but with no success.

The American chemical manufacturer, Union Carbide, will never admit responsibility for the tragedy. They will claim that all safety regulations were followed and that the disaster was the result of sabotage by a disgruntled employee.

But survivors and campaigners will tell a different story - one of corporate greed and carelessness that cost the lives of thousands in a worst industrial disaster in history on December 3rd, 1984.

Outro

Next on History Daily. December 4th, 1991. After 64 years dominating the skies, the once great Pan American Airways shuts down its entire operation.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Mollie Baack.

Sound design by Mischa Stanton.

Music by Lindsay Graham.

This episode is written and researched by William Simpson.

Executive Producers are Steven Walters for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.