The accident in Bhopal: Observations 20 years later

Abstract

The most influential process safety accident passed its 20th anniversary on Dec 3, 2004. At an international symposium to mark the event in Kanpur, India during the week of this anniversary, process safety practitioners from around the world assembled to discuss progress in resolving the Bhopal tragedy and in advancing the practice of process safety worldwide. This paper reports the main conclusions from the conference, and provides insight into the Bhopal site as attendees found it in December 2004. Since 1984, many positive steps worldwide have been made in regards to improvements in process safety and protection of personnel within chemical plants and of people in the surrounding communities. However, little progress has been made in decommissioning and decontaminating the Bhopal plant site, now under control of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Many plant chemicals, abandoned there in 1985, were still at the site in 2004, mostly in sub-standard storage conditions. Mitigation recently commenced, but unconfirmed reports of the mitigation methods are concerning. The lesson learned: we all have a responsibility to insure that events which follow a chemical accident reach a proper conclusion; and that no further undue suffering results to the general public and our fellow employees.

From Green to Sustainable Industrial Chemistry

“…Notably, no universally accepted cause exists [31], and sabotage, for example, whereby somebody deliberately connected a water hose to piping that directly entered into the storage tank, is still supported by some authors. However, this theory would require (i) an intimate knowledge of piping around the tank, where to physically make the correct connection, (ii) removal of a pressure indicator and then (iii) the re-attachment of piping fittings.…”

Harnessing database resources for understanding the profile of chemical process industry incidents

“…The Bhopal disaster (1984) is a classic example of the negative impact of a chemical incident (Bowonder, 1987). This single incident has brought about substantial regulatory changes throughout the US and worldwide (Willey, Hendershot, & Berger, 2006). While no other incident can come close to the devastation racked by the Bhopal incident, there are other catastrophes which were major disasters such as the Texas City Incident (1947) (Blocker & Blocker, 1949), the Flixborough incident (1974) (Venart, 2004;Mannan, 2005), the Phillips explosion (1989) (Lepkowski, 1989) and more recently the BP Texas City incident (2005) (Hopkins, 2010;Khan & Amyotte, 2007).…”

Dynamic Semi-Quantitative Risk Research in Chemical Plants

“…When an accident occurs, the consequences can be very serious. Historical examples include the Bhopal tragedy [1], the Piper Alpha [2], the Flixborough disaster [3], BP Texas City [4], the West Fertilizer explosion [5], the Tianjin explosion, etc. [6] (details of these events are shown in Table 1).…”