Behind the Bastards - The Industrial Disaster That Makes Chernobyl Look Like Kindergarten

Episode Date: July 30, 2019

In Episode 76, Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus to discuss the worst industrial disaster in history: Bhopal, India.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What poisoning my giant city of hundreds of thousands of people due to industrial negligence? I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards. The podcast will tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. My guest today is the inimitable, the inevitable, the inimicable.

Jamie Loctus! I thought I was inevitable. Just a natural part of life. Hi, am I allowed to tell the listeners that I didn't know what we were talking about today until I think you just revealed it? I did a little bit. If you know much about this particular disaster, a lot of people may have guessed. No, no, actually. Or not Chernobs. Not Chernobs. Chernobs as I affectionately call that disaster. Well, I'm glad that you first off, Jamie Loctus, co-host of The Bechtel Cast. Oh, yes. The actress and creative visionary behind a one woman show that's going to be in Scotland soon.

Yes, Edinburgh. All August, baby. Come out, Scotland Heads. Scotland Heads. Check her out. Yeah, it's actually, I'm really glad that you guessed Chernoble. Because I think a lot of people having heard that intro would have guessed Chernoble. And judging by the state of my Twitter mentions a month or so ago, I think about everybody I know was watching Chernoble. It's because Jared, was it Jared Harris? It's because he's a sexy daddy and people love sexy daddies on TV. I know everybody loves a sexy dad. Sometimes I adopt children just to be sexier.

Don't take care of them. Don't raise them. Just adopt them. Well, that sounds extremely negligent and honestly go off. I love it. So, yeah, I haven't seen the Chernoble TV show yet. I am going to watch it. I just haven't had time to get into it. And a lot of people have begged me to do an episode on Chernoble and I expect I will one of these days because it's a really terrible disaster. There were a lot of bastards behind it. But I think most people who watched the series but didn't do much outside reading on Chernoble would be surprised to learn that the immediate death toll from the disaster was quite a lot lower than I think TV dramatizations might lead you to believe. Interesting. The explosion killed two people directly. Another 29 died in the hospital in the few days following the disaster.

And that's it as far as a direct death toll from the actual meltdown itself. Oh, so actually kind of no big deal. Well, I wouldn't say that. But it is like the long term health consequences are a little bit harder to pin down. Can we put you on record as Chernoble NBD? Yeah, Chernoble NBD. In fact, maybe good. Maybe great. Okay, you took the take. Yeah. No, as of like 2011, there have been a total of 28 deaths due to acute radiation syndrome and another 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer.

Now, because radiation lasts a very long time, the eventual death toll from Chernoble decades from now will probably number into the thousands. In 2016, the World Health Organization estimated the eventual death toll of Chernoble at around 4,000 people. It's a pretty serious disaster, very bad. Yeah, terrible tragedy. But today we're going to talk about a disaster that dwarfs Chernoble, a calamity many times deadlier than the worst nuclear disaster in human history, with longer lasting catastrophic impacts on the people who live around it. Today, we are talking about the worst industrial disaster in the history of our species. Today, we're talking about Bhopal, India. You ever heard of Bhopal?

I have not, no. Oh, good. I'm glad to hear this. A new disaster to me. Always looking for a new disaster. Everybody, we all are. That's a disaster capitalism, baby. I love it. I would pay $30 for a t-shirt that says disaster capitalism. And not think too hard about how it was made. Sophie, can we get the t-shirt people on that? No.

What do you do that to my dream, Sophie? I'll do it and then I'll put it in the Bechtelkast store. No, that's the wiser. Just cash that check on somebody else's account. The question I want everybody to ask themselves at the end of this episode, and kind of be thinking about as we go through this story, because this is something that I think about a lot, is why does every Western school kid learn the name Chernobyl,

but nobody knows, or very few people in the West have heard of Bhopal. So keep that one in your head as we go through this. Bhopal is a city, the capital of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. It's known as the city of lakes and is famed for being one of the greenest cities in all of India. A little bit like India's Portland, you might say, at least geographically. In the early 1980s, it was home to more than a million people. Now in the middle of the last century, India was hit with a major food crisis, due to an exploding population and farmland that had still not really recovered

from the damage done to it by centuries of British misrule. So India launched the Green Revolution in the early 1960s, with the goal of using science and technology to reform their agricultural practices and increase their crop yields. In the late 60s, the government started reaching out to foreign companies, offering them incentives to bring jobs to India, and one of the companies they approached was Union Carbide, an American chemical giant with a name that sounds like they're going to do some fucking shit.

I just want to say, that sounds like bad writing. Can someone just tell the people naming these companies? I guess now things aren't quite as on-the-nose sinister. Now it's just like every evil company ends with an L.Y. Yeah. Like Murderly. Murderly is only slightly less subtle than Union Carbide. Union Carbide, yeah. That also sounds like a really good name for a cartoon villain.

Union Carbide? Yeah. Oh, yeah. We meet him early in the movie, and he's like, my name's Union, and you're like, oh, that sounds good. Union Carbide, and you're like, oh shit, it's going to kill us. Just like all carbides do. Exactly.

Now, Union Carbide, one of their big, big, they made a lot of different chemicals, but one of their big money makers was a pesticide called 7, and it's spelled S-E-V-I-N. Are you kidding me? Yeah, that's such a sinister name for a pesticide, isn't it? I mean, I don't, but it's just, it's really gaudy. This is really gaudy villainy. Yeah, yeah, 7. I don't know why that's, maybe because of the movie 7 with Brad Pitt.

Yeah. It just sounds so, yeah, like Met Ball Evil. Like really campy evil, anyways. Yeah, campy, exaggerated evil. A pesticide called 7. Now, 7 was popular in Latin America and popular in Asia. And so, since it was so popular in Asia, from like a balance sheet standpoint, having a manufacturing plant in India made a lot of sense for Union Carbide.

So, the company worked out an arrangement with the Indian government, where the Indian government would hold a 22% stake in the Union Carbide subsidiary company that was formed to manage the plant. Union Carbide, India Limited. There was a great excitement around the deal at first, and Union Carbide began to market their products using the slogan, science helps build a new India. Which is, again, so fucking sinister.

God, yeah. God, it's just, when people are so villainous, they don't even care if they come off that way. That is another level. They were inadvertently foreshadowing. This just sounds like, have you seen Paddington 2, Robert? No, I have not. Is Paddington 2 about this?

It's basically a rehashing of this. It sounds like, no, this is more Caitlin Durante's department. But in Paddington 2, Hugh Grant plays this over-the-top villain who sounds like he would have a pesticide called 7, and say like a quippy villain. Yeah. Yeah. Also, an incredible dance number.

Well, that's good. That's good. Hugh Grant, you say? Yes, yes. In the role, in a career-defining role. Yeah. That's good because his career needed some definition after that garbage he put out in the 90s.

Harsh. See, I can rarely tell the difference between Colin Firth and Hugh Grant, and that's my feminism. As I understand it, if water rolls off of its back, it's Colin Firth. If you throw it in water and it floats. Yeah. Then it's Hugh Grant.

It is Hugh Grant. Okay, that's very helpful. Thank you. Yeah. So, yeah. It's why you always throw a water bottle. To test whether or not it's Colin Firth or Hugh Grant. Mm-hmm.

So, construction of the Union Carbide plant started in 1969. Now, the plant's purpose would be to manufacture carbaryl, which was the active ingredient in the popular pesticide, 7, and another chemical called alid carb for a pesticide named Timic. Both bug poisons required large amounts of a regular poison to manufacture. The key ingredient was something called methylisocyanate,

which is an inspeakably deadly gas at, like, room temperatures. MIC, as we will refer to it in most of this episode, is colorless and heavier than air. It functions similarly to phosphgene gas, the deadliest poison gas of the First World War. And, appropriately enough, phosphgene gas is one of the byproducts of producing MIC. So, they're making bug poison out of this unspeakably deadly poison gas.

Okay. Critical ingredient. I am very curious about what their graphic design game is, because this all sounds so sinister, and I'm wondering if it matches. You know, there are some ads I've seen. One of them was, like, a Latin American ad, and it's got, like, a smiling, like, in the background,

like, a smiling Mexican farmer in all white clothes with a bushel of fruits and vegetables in his arm. And then, in the foreground, you've got the seven pesticide, which has been, like, anthropomorphized as a tiny person beating the shit out of bugs. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It's great.

Okay. Well, okay. It didn't disappoint. Yeah. Now, initially, all the methylisocyanate used in the Bopal plant was manufactured in the good old U.S. of A. The site where the plant was constructed had only been zoned for light industry and commercial use,

not for manufacturing tons and tons of poisonous chemical gas, as it was surrounded both by bodies of water and densely populated slums. But by the late 1970s, financial pressure from competition led Union Carbide to decide they should start manufacturing MIC in Bopal. They called the process of refitting their plant to manufacture the raw materials and the final product,

backward integration. Now, Union Carbide instituted rigorous safety procedures in order to keep the plant and the citizens of Bopal safe. There were two sirens, a loud, continuous one to warn members of the public and a quieter one to announce problems to the factory workers within the plant itself. There were also a number of safety measures within the plant, a refrigeration unit to chill the MIC,

thus condensing it into a liquid and rendering it much safer, a vent gas scrubber to remove dangerous substances from the plant's industrial exhaust, and a flare tower in order to burn off excess deadly gases. But the most important safety feature of the Union Carbide plant was a well-trained workforce. All plant operators were required to have a college degree in either a related scientific field or in engineering.

They received six months of training to ensure that they had a working understanding of not just their own specific jobs, but the jobs of everyone else on their shift. This is critical in plants working with chemicals as dangerous as MIC. Workers obviously need to understand the whole plant so they could spot potential problems or mistakes before a disaster occurs. So that all sounds great, right?

Yeah, this sounds above board, leaps and bounds over Theranos. Very much better than Theranos. People are qualified to be doing their jobs. I like this. Actually, I was looking up some of the advertising for this as well, and I found, did you see the advertising campaign that's just a gigantic white hand pouring a vial of chemicals onto, I swear to God, it's a gigantic white man's hand pouring chemicals onto India.

And it says, ScienceHouse, build a new India Union Carbide. A hand in things to come. Gigantic, I mean, it's just... Jesus, a hand in things to come. Come on, people. It's just, it's hideous. It's embarrassing. If you're listening to this podcast and a Hollywood producer, there's your intro for the miniseries based on Bhopal India. Just animate all of these horrifying ads and slogans. There's so many of them. There's another one with a huge white man's hand

pouring chemicals onto a factory in India. What is that even supposed to mean? It says, oh, more jobs through science. Hollywood Netflix, you're just leaving money on the table if you don't produce this. Please check out the very menacing white man's hand advertising for Union Carbide. It is horrifying. Wow. There's at least ten of them.

He's holding strawberries in one, he's holding dirt in one, pouring chemicals in a lot. Oh, one in his hands on fire. Oh, cool. Fingers of flame that pierce solid rock. What the fuck is wrong with these people? Why would you? This one is wild. Fingers of flame that pierce solid rock.

Yes, through a dramatic new process known as jet piercing, holes can now be burned straight through solid rock. The harder the rock, the more efficient the operation. A special combination of oxygen, fuel, and water does the job and does it in just the fraction of the time of the old drill attack. There's a flaming hand just punching through rock. Cool. These all sound like great ads that were dreamed up by

coked up people who had like a gut level intuition that their company was going to do something horrible. And what year are we in right now? We're in like the 1970s at this point when things get up and running. This is a Don Draper joint, this fire hand punching through rock. Got it. Yeah.

I just walked through all of the kind of the safety features of the Bhopal plant and on paper, that's how everything worked. But as I talked about earlier, increasing financial pressures led Union Carbide to start cutting costs. And the easiest place to cut was basic safety procedures. In 1976, the two trade unions that represented the plant's workers sent out letters of complaint to their managers in the Indian Ministry of Labor talking about unsafe levels of pollution within the plant.

They received no response. The 1980s started and Union Carbide's financial woes continued. Conditions at the factory began to degrade further as wages were cut and standards for workers started dropping. Union Carbide stopped requiring all of their employees to have degrees. Six months of training turned into eight weeks. In 1981, things had gotten bad enough that foce gene gas spewed out of a badly maintained holding tank and into the face of a worker.

He ripped off his mask in a panic and died horrifically three days later. His managers, yeah, terrible. His managers, of course, management of the plant blamed him because he'd removed his mask after getting sprayed in the face with poison. Well, sure. The Union pointed out that the faulty valve had been responsible for the accident and that the plant had not provided the worker with proper protective gear, so the mask would not have done much if he'd left it on his face.

Plant management ignored this. Of course it does. That sounds very inconvenient. Sounds very inconvenient for them. In January of 1982, there was another false gene leak. 24 workers were hospitalized, but at least this time, nobody died. Workers began to agitate for better safety precautions. In February of 1982, an MIC leak injured another 18 workers.

In August of the same year, a chemical engineer suffered burns to 30% of his body from another MIC leak. Leaks continued to happen every month or so, injuring workers at a steady pace. Now, if you were a responsible corporation, you might say, boy, the monthly poison gas leaks might be a sign that something is awry with our factory and perhaps major changes should be made. What if you were the type of company whose mascot is a gigantic Caucasian hand? What would you do if that were more your vibe?

Well, I think you would continue cutting costs. We're getting to one of the most fucked up crazy things to this whole story. Union Carbide to their credit did make some concessions for the health and well-being of their Indian employees. It provided them with twice-yearly medical exams from the plant doctor, which sounds great. They did blood and urine tests. That sounds like some bare minimum stuff that never happens. It was a little less than bare minimum because while they were given blood and urine tests,

workers were never actually given the results of their exams. Union Carbide India Management put out brochures advising employees that they could develop a resistance to poison by drinking six or seven glasses of milk per day and eating a lot of fish and eggs. What? Drink some milk. What is the logic behind that? It's just like a mommy thing.

Shut up and drink your milk and there's no way in you'll never die. By this point, Union Carbide knows that the plant's not going to be there forever. They've got a couple years more and they're going to gradually pull all of the assets out of it and shut it down. The unions are agitating for expensive work to make the plant safe and stop killing workers and stuff. So this was sort of a delaying tactic. We're not going to give them any money or better medical care. Tell them to drink milk. Again, so over the top villainous.

Yeah, it's really fucked up. You can picture someone in a gigantic money throne being like, just tell them to drink milk. I don't care. Tell them to drink milk. It's amazing. Did they provide the milk? Why would you do that?

No, of course not. I hate it. Yeah, it's awful and at the same time, by the time we're through with this, you'll barely remember that because of how fucked up everything else is. This fucking story. By the end of 1982, most of the original MIC operators had resigned. Workers from other Union Carbide plants without the proper training and experience to work with such a dangerous chemical were brought in to manage the plant.

They received 14 days of training. That's clearly enough. Geez. Due to fears of industrial espionage, these new workers did not have access to manuals that told them how to do their job. Only the manager could access the manual, which was, of course, printed in English, a language not spoken by the majority of the workers. Cool. Cool.

I mean, it seems fair to, I love a good tale of oppressing the poor, especially when it's being done by evil white Americans. Cool. Like milk, oppressing the poor does a body good. Yeah. That'll be funny to the three or four people who remember that old milk industry campaign. I do remember it. Yeah.

I'm still stuck on the milk thing. It's fucking wild. God, have someone punch that up at least. Have someone punch up this villainy. It's coming in a little stale for me. A little bit. Yeah. At this point, the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal was already dangerously ill-maintained, as I think we've established.

Yeah. But company management decided there were still more costs to be cut. They started slashing worker training even more, according to a UC Davis paper by Ingrid Ekerman on working conditions in the plant. Quote, During the training period, technicians were treated as casual workers. After the training, they were only paid an hourly rate. A technician who accepted a job at the MIC plant got a paper about receiving six months of training, but after five weeks, he was asked to stop the training and to take charge as a full-fledged plant operator. In the matter of promotions, individuals with little experience but with unquestioning loyalty to the bosses were invariably selected before others.

A demand for extra safety precautions led to warnings that appointments could be terminated. In 1983, in 1984, there were personnel reductions in order to cut costs. Workers were encouraged to take early retirement. 300 temporary workers were laid off, and another 150 permanent workers were put in a pool to be assigned to jobs as needed. The operating shifts were cut from 12 to 6, and maintenance shifts from 6 to 2. So they just cut out two-thirds of the maintenance shifts. Like, we don't need that on this deadly poison plant. Right.

We don't need anyone checking our work. No. They're okay. So, do we know, like, what, what am I trying to say? Like, are they dodging existing labor laws? Or are the labor laws in India at this time sort of allowing this to happen? Or is the company having to sort of, like, dodge around stuff? Both of those things are simultaneously true. So, they are skirting some laws and regulations, primarily about safety.

And they're able to get away with it because of their connections in the Indian government and because of the amount of money that this all represents. So, both of those things are true. Oh, good. You know what else is true, Jamie? What's true, Robert? None of the sponsors of this show have contributed to an industrial disaster of this scale. Can you be so sure, Robert? This is a terrible ad play.

These advertisers are not guilty of any major disaster that we're currently aware of. Of course, this is always subject to change. And it's entirely possible the next ad will be a Coke Industries ad. And one of the things Coke Industry has gotten attacked for is that at their oil refining plants, they were doing the same thing that Bhopal was doing, where they were giving people screenings for levels of toxic chemicals in their blood, but not giving them the results of their blood tests. And so people died because they got sick, but Coke Industries wanted to ring a little bit of extra productivity out of them before they went to get treated. How fun.

How fun. So, if the ad is for Coke Industries, they have in fact contributed to industrial disasters on a significant scale. But, you know, dick pills haven't. Yeah, dick pills. Do you do brain pills? We just turned down brain pills. We don't do brain pills. I won't do brain pills.

I'm fine with dick pills. I think that's ethical, but no brain pills. We turned down almost everything, which is why we're still poor. You know, I don't have much of a conscience. I won't sell brain pills. But also, I love dick pills. Dick pills, I would, yeah, I don't think we would ever get an offer for that. They work.

Yeah, we should get, I hope that we get some, you know, dick pill offers. Really, any genitalia pills were open to hawking. Any genital related products. Yeah, I want, I want it to be like an intersectional, inclusive, scary pill. I mean, speaking of the milk industries ads, I wish there were just a genitalia industry that we could, we could plug for. Big genital. Big genital, yeah.

Just plug the concept of genitalia. That came straight down from big genital. You can't trust it. Yeah, BG. All right, I think we've put enough distance in between my terrible first segue and the ads. Now it's time for products! Products! What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you,

hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic. And occasionally ridiculous. Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records.

We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back! We're talking about erections, but we don't need to keep talking about erections. No, that's the beautiful thing about a conversation about erections. It can end at any time. It can end at any time, much like an erection, unless you have dick pills. Oh, my uncle would've loved that one. Good. I did that one for all of the uncles, and also Bob Dole, who is a big listener of this podcast. Huge fan of the cast. Yeah, I'm the number one fan. Yeah, he's got merch. Yeah, thank you, Bobby. Alright, let's get back into the tale here.

So, chemical accidents continue to pace throughout the early 80s. In October of 1982, an operator was burned and two workers exposed to gases during an MIC leak. In 1983 and 1984, there were numerous additional leaks of MIC, chlorine gas, phosphine gas, and other deadly poisons. Often, multiple poisons would leak out at the same time, which is, you know, I love synergy, and the synergy of deadly poisons is all synergy. It's just a chef's salad of death and despair. Make deadly poisons work together again. That's gonna be my election slogan. Yeah, there's so many, I mean, yeah, any story about factory worker abuse and neglect is just the fucking worst. Yeah, it's a fucking nightmare. And this is the worst of those stories in the history of the human race, so yeah.

And of course, as always, it's like because, like, I don't know, I never learned about this. Because even though I must have learned about like the triangle factory fire nine million times, I've heard about Chernobyl a million times. So much is erased from American education, or maybe I'm just stupid, but I think. No, no, no, this one is not in the textbooks that we tend to get. Yeah, I'm sure if you get like OSHA training, they talk about this motherfucker. Which I intend to do, by the way. Oh, good. Good. We need that for podcasting. There's a room full of poison behind you, so.

It's just poisonous takes thoughts, all that. No, I mean, there's literal poison gas in the room behind you. Where? Oh, is that why we can't go out on the balcony? Yeah, that's why we can't go out on the balcony. It's full of poison. I forgot. Yeah, I always want to go out there the other day, Robert. Wait, what happened? Don't tell me that. I gained so much joy from the poison room.

What? Wait, where is the poison room in relation? It's just there? Why is that a poison room? Anyway, speaking of poison rooms, let's get back to Bhopal, India. So, as we already talked about the first group to blow the whistle about the dangers of the Bhopal Union Carbide plant, where the plant workers themselves, as I already said, they were organized into two competing trade unions, which is an unusual state of affairs that existed primarily because it made life easier for the plant management. After the leak in 1982, one of the trade unions printed 6,000 posters and put them up all around the city of Bhopal,

warning denizens of the dangers at their door. One union leader went on a hunger strike at the entrance of the factory. According to Ekraman's paper, quote, The result was that all political and trade union meetings inside the factory were banned. One UC staff member burnt the principal union's tent. In the ensuing scuffle, several people were injured. The two trade union leaders were laid off. Meetings and processions were held throughout the city. As the plant staff regarded the plant as one of the safest ships in the modern industrial fleet, the demonstrations were considered to be a campaign by agitators wanting higher salaries and shorter working hours.

Not agitators! Not agitators wanting more money and a better quality of life, yeah. And I guess, again, so, what is the state of unions in India at this point? I mean, better than the state of unions in the US in 2019. Oh, good. Well, I mean, that's saying practically nothing, but you know what, the world's got, what, three years left anyways? Yeah, year and a half. I was thinking that two years. I was like, I was thinking about like, at this point, why would you follow your dreams, you know? Like, you might as well just like, write it out.

I follow my short term dreams of like, having enough intoxicants. That's the only way. Right. Like, you just have to like, if you don't have any kids, just live fast because you can't like, don't go back to school now. Yeah, don't go back to school. Don't read a book. No, we're running out of time. If you're going to school, invest in some really good bolt cutters. One of those like, $500 pairs that won't conduct electricity so you can snap through like, the gates of a rich person's house, even if it's like, mined or electrified or something like that. Robert, you guys have the scariest advice in the entire world.

I'm just saying, a better investment than school at this point is increasing your ability to do take vengeance. Every other conversation we have, you should buy a weapon. I mean, bolt cutters aren't inherently a weapon. They have a lot of uses. They have a lot of uses to bring a weapon on a bus to Phoenix. I was like, I'm not going to do that. Phoenix is a dangerous city. I did find it to be dangerous. That's true.

It's filled with Arizonans. The deadliest people in America other than Floridians and Texans and Oklahomans. Yeah, they were fast and loose. And Louisianaans. They're a very high concentration of Hooters in Phoenix as well because I went to a Hooters and then across the street there was a Scottish Hooters. It went by some other name. Scooters? Scooters.

Oh, you mean like the Tilted Kilt? Yeah. Yeah, there's a bunch of those in the fucking Southwest. Yeah, we had a lot in Texas too. Wild. Yep. So, with the Union's Hobbelt, Union Carbide Management was free to lay off even more experienced workers and cut even more costs in how their plant was managed. One example, the best industry practices for storing methyl isocyanate MIC was to store it in 52 gallon drums and have like a lot of small drums rather than one gigantic storage vat.

This was considered safer because it reduced the amount that could get out during an individual leak. But Union Carbide was like, all those 52 gallon drums are going to cost a shitload of money and it's going to take more time. Let's just put it in one gigantic container even though that's way less safe and is explicitly what every expert on the chemical says, no, don't fucking do that. Let's just do it anyway because it'll save us some bucks. So, Union Carbide's own technical manual for MIC warned that this was literally the most dangerous way to store the substance. While small drums of the gas do not require refrigeration, it is absolutely necessary for safe bulk storage. Unfortunately, the refrigeration unit designed to do this was, according to a later report by the Indian government's chief scientists, small and ineffective. In late 1984, it was turned off entirely after plant managers talked with their bosses at the American headquarters of Union Carbide and determined it was unnecessary.

The refrigeration unit was determined to be unnecessary because shutting it off would save money on electricity and allow them to reroute the freon to other parts of the plant and save even more money. This is connecting this refrigeration unit added whole pennies to the shareholder value of Union Carbide. This is the equivalent of just lighting Titanic lifeboats on fire. Yeah, fuck these lifeboats. Just cause, need more room. It's like lighting those lifeboats on fire as you do shots with the captain to convince him to get as close to that iceberg as he can say. Yeah, it's like an edging thing. I want to throw a beer at it.

Taking body shots off the cap. Ridiculous. So Union Carbide's manual for MIC did not include any guidance as to what employees might do in the event of a massive leak. Fairly little was known about the chemical, so the manual simply suggested dumping it into a spare storage tank. It noted, there may be other situations not covered above. The situation will determine the appropriate action. We will learn more and more as we gain actual experience. Which is a great thing to hear in the manual for a deadly chemical that you're producing by the tongue.

Oh my god. Love it. Love it. This is, there's no, and I'm imagining there's no like formal regulatory body that would say, oversee something like this. Are they even pretending to have any sort of regular like regulation? They're definitely pretending. Okay, well I'm like at least show some effort. Oh yeah, they fake it a little bit.

Not a whole lot because again, like it's India and rules are a lot less strict there. Right. But they do fake it to an extent. And I want to note because like I've spent a decent amount of time in India and I really love the country. And there's a lot of very valid criticism about how loose a lot of the rules about worker health and safety are and have been going back decades. Totally fair to hit them on that. There were also and are also a lot of people in the country who care a lot about reforming that. And in the case of the ticking time bomb that was the Bhopal Union Carbide Plant, there was a heroic journalist in addition to those like union workers who tried to blow the whistle.

Now this journalist's name was Raj Kumar Kaswani and he wrote for a local Hindu weekly paper called the Saptahik Report. And in late 1982, he started receiving tips about the poor maintenance and constant leaks inside the Union Carbide facility. Raj Kumar began to investigate and became convinced that an apocalyptic danger awaited the city of Bhopal. In September and October, he ran a series of articles with the most heartbreaking headlines imaginable. The first article was titled, Save, please save this city. The second article was titled, Bhopal on the mouth of a volcano. And the third was titled, If you don't understand, you will be wiped out. Go Raj.

You really can't be more direct in a title. No buried leads with this guy. Yeah, he's setting the tone. I'm glad that he did. Because especially it sounds like the union workers are already out here saying this is happening. And then it's just like if the company and the culture is already made that decision not to care. He's literally writing, you're going to die. Seriously, not kidding. We're all about to fucking die. Please read. Please for the love of God, do something.

As we all know from the last couple of years especially, nobody listened to Raj Kumar. By 1984, MIC production at the Bhopal plant was down to about a quarter of its height. Cost-cutting features had reduced maintenance shifts to roughly a quarter of their necessary frequency and robbed the plant of most of its highly trained staff. Mr. Parikh, a former project manager at the plant, reported, the whole industrial culture of union carbide at Bhopal went down the drain. The plant was losing money. Top management decided that saving money was more important than safety. Maintenance practices became poor and things generally got sloppy.

The plant didn't seem to have a future and a lot of skilled people became depressed and left as a result. And this was the situation. On December 2nd, 1984, when things started to go badly wrong at the plant. And how many people are working at this plant? Oh, not that many people. There's only six folks on staff. Okay, okay. Yeah. The first sign of this was in pressure readings from the gas tanks that registered at five times the normal levels. Sumande, the senior operator on duty, said he did not consider this a problem. Another worker who saw the same readings half an hour later had the same reaction.

He later recalled to the New York Times, there was a continual problem with instruments. Instruments often didn't work. So they didn't see like it was showing elevated levels of gases, but it kind of always did because all of the instruments were garbage, so they just didn't think of it as a problem. Now, it might have helped in this case if the Bhopal plant had enjoyed a complex computer monitoring system to check for things like gases. And this is where I point out that Union Carbide operated a second almost identical chemical plant,

producing MIC in West Virginia. It was also known as the sister plant to the one in Bhopal. And that plant did in fact have a sophisticated computer monitoring system to quickly warn staff members about leaks. Meanwhile, in India, Union Carbide preferred to rely on workers to notice leaks when their eyes started to water from all the poison in the air. Oh my God. Yeah.

Laughter about what's coming is like the anxious reaction that comes because of the horrors. I wonder which country the company cared about more. Yeah. Impossible to say. No need to bring race into this, Jamie. Yeah. No, no, no. I'm sorry.

That was a reach and I can't apologize enough. 11.30 p.m., December 2nd, workers in the methyl isocyanate structure 100 feet from the control room noticed that their eyes had started to water. One operator, last name Sing, spotted a liquid drip in a yellowish white gas. He went to the control room at 11.45 p.m. and told his boss that they had another MIC leak. His boss, a Mr. Qureshi, told him that he would look into it after having his tea. This is literally Titanic, Robert. Yeah.

But it's like iceberg right ahead. He's like, okay, let me just finish my beer first. This is going to make Titanic look like a skidoo crash. Well, Titanic in retrospect, like a lot of rich people died and we can't fault the ocean for claiming the rich. No, no. I'm all right with that, actually. Sorry. Not to say that.

Yeah. No one looked into the leak until after 12.40 a.m. once management had finished with their tea. And while we can and should mock management for waiting until after tea to check on a poison gas leak, I should note here that it's likely none of them would have known what to do if they had checked earlier. The positions of second and third shift maintenance supervisor had been eliminated several days before the disaster, so there was actually no one on duty whose job it was to fix this stuff. In fact, on the night of December 2nd, there was not a single trained engineer at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. So the people whose job it was to maintain the plant did not know how to maintain it.

They knew nothing about MIC or Fosgene, the two deadly gases stored by the ton in enormous cylinders. The supervisor was initially convinced that no leak was possible because they'd stopped production for the night. The New York Times spoke to several of these workers. MK Jane, an operator on duty on the night of the accident, said that he did not understand large parts of the plant. His three months of instrument training and two weeks of theoretical work taught him to operate only one of several methyl isocyanate systems. He said, if there was a problem in another MIC system, I don't know how to deal with it, said Mr. Jane, a high school graduate. Raman Khan, the operator who washed the improperly sealed pipe a few hours before the accident, said, I was trained for one particular area and one particular job. I don't know about other jobs. During training, they just said, these are the valves you are supposed to turn.

This is the system in which you work. Here are the instruments and what they indicate. That's it. Okay. So the whole training was done away with? Yeah, basically. In order to talk about how the disaster started and what happened next, I'm going to quote from a National Institute of Health article on what happened, because it kind of describes it mechanically. Okay. The vent gas scrubber, a safety device designed to neutralize toxic discharge from the MIC system, had been turned off three weeks prior. Apparently, a faulty valve had allowed one ton of water for cleaning internal pipes to mix with 40 tons of MIC. A 30 ton refrigeration unit that normally served as a safety component to cool the MIC storage tank had been drained of its coolant for use in another part of the plant. Pressure and heat from the vigorous exothermic reaction in the tank continued to build. The gas flare safety system was out of action and had been for three months. At around 1 a.m. December 3rd, loud rumbling reverberated around the plant as a safety valve gave way, sending a plume of MIC gas into the early morning air.

Jesus Christ. Now, it didn't kill the workers at the plant. This is not like Chernobyl. It's much worse. Because the gas, which was heavier than air, floated down into the slums surrounding the chemical plant and into the lungs of thousands upon thousands of sleeping citizens. The wind blew the poisonous gas as far and wide, covering an area of almost 40 square kilometers. Hundreds choked to death in their sleep as their lungs literally liquefied and drowned them. Thousands more awoke, eyes burning, mouths frothing, driven nearly mad by a choking terror few of us can imagine. Nearly 4,000 people died on the first night. As many people as the World Health Organization estimates will die, in total, from the Chernobyl disaster over the next several decades. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Kind of frustrating we don't learn about this one. It's, yeah, extremely telling that we don't learn about this one. That's, oh my God, so 4,000 and the poison acts immediately. In a matter of hours, yeah.

Jesus. Now, since MIC is twice as heavy as air, children were poisoned first, and had the most trouble escaping the deadly gases. And as bad as the leak was, it should have been easy for most of the victims to escape. A wet cloth over the mouth would have acted as a crude gas mask long enough for virtually everyone affected to climb to higher ground and get above the gas. But no one in Bhopal knew these facts, because Union Carbide had not bothered to spend the money to inform the citizens about what they might need to do if the giant poison gas plant in their city ever exploded. And that would maybe even cost anything. Barely anything. Yeah. To print, yeah. You'd have to print some stuff. Yeah, you would just have to, I guess, yeah, buy one, a couple of ads in a newspaper. So cruel.

Yeah. Doctors were at first not even aware of what chemical people had been poisoned with, because Union Carbide had not bothered to have a little sit down with any of them, either. According to an India Today report on the disaster, quote, The public siren was put on around 1am, but only for a few minutes, and after that, the muted siren took over. This was per carbide procedure, which was evolved to avoid alarming the public around the factory over tiny leaks. But in the present case, it was gross negligence that the continuous siren was put off, although it was already known by then, that MIC was escaping in huge quantities. It was not until 2am, one hour later, that the public siren was sounded again on full blast to alert the already terrified, injured, and dying in the city. So that's cool. That just seems aggressive at that point. Like, yeah, people know something's up. Yeah, because they're dying by the hundreds. Everyone they know just died. You don't need to turn on the siren now, asshole. So, this is time for an ad plug.

This is a really dark time for an ad plug. Maybe our darkest ad pivot of all time. I mean, this is just, like, devastating. Yeah, it's soul crushing. Well, I mean, I just, I don't know, every day I learned about something new that was just completely omitted from my education so I could learn misinformation about the founding fathers and it makes me angry. But, you know, But you know what really comforts me in these moments of anger? Products and services?

Products and services. We're back on the fucking train, baby. All right, now some ads. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! We're back. And things are not going well. Things are not going great. The alarms have been sounded after 4,000 people have died. Yeah, just, yeah, 4,000 people or so.

So, in order to kind of put together or provide a picture of exactly what was going on and what it was like to be at ground zero for this, I'm going to quote from an India Today report. The siren was heard by Syed Khan as he ran away, leaving his family coughing and sputtering. By the time he returned in the morning, his father, mother, and two brothers were dead. Only a sister survived. Shiv Narang, a machine operator at the Strava Products factory, lost a three-month-old boy. But seven of his 12 neighbors, all of whom shared a four-room, L-shaped hut, died. Among the dead were Nathu Ram Kuswa, the owner of the hut, his wife, and two children. Kuswa died because he couldn't leave his wife's side. She had just delivered their second child a few hours earlier. Oh my God. Stories like that are repeated across the city of Bhopal, to thousands upon thousands of people and families. Now, the Bhopal accident was the first time that doctors saw the effective MIC gas on human beings at any kind of scale. Those who died the first day had lungs that were as much as three times their normal weight. The autopsy team suffered gas poisoning as they cut open bodies that were essentially filled with chemical weaponry.

An exact death toll for the immediate wake of the Bhopal disaster will never be known. Estimates rage as high as 10 to 15,000 in the first few days. With another 15 to 20,000 premature deaths over the next 20 years. So at this point, we're looking at 30 to 40,000 dead conservatively right now. Again, 10 times the death toll of Chernobyl. And just, I mean, a morbid question from me. The 4,000 people who die immediately, does that have to do with range, with the closeness to the, or is there any indication of why certain people survived and others didn't? These are the people who mostly they're asleep. They live very close to where the leak happens. So the gas hits them first and they just choke to death on their lungs. There's just no time. Yeah, got hit and got hurt, but like got away, many of whom were still hurt enough that they died within a few days. Others just suffered injuries that would kill them 5, 10, 15 years later.

Yeah. In the immediate wake of the disaster, Union Carbide set to work trying to avoid any blame for this calamity, their incompetence and mismanagement had brought into the world. It first tried to shift the blame by blaming Union Carbide India, claiming that the plant had been built and was operated wholly by the subsidiary corporation. They also floated theories that an unknown Sikh extremist group had attacked the plant and caused the disaster. Then they blamed angry employees, essentially trying to shift the blame to the union workers who tried to warn them about the plant's issues back in 1976. They tried to blame an unknown Sikh extremist group like, just blame the Sikhs! Yeah, let's just... Yeah, pretty frustrating.

Yeah, blame the union, sure. So, the first lawsuit against Union Carbide landed on December 7th, less than a week after the disaster. It was filed by an American attorney in a U.S. court. The first great piece of journalism on the disaster was published in January by The New York Times, based on dozens of interviews with plant workers. Union Carbide representatives and members of the Indian government. They were the first paper to report on much of what I talked about today. The cost-cutting, elimination of trained personnel, shutdown of basic safety equipment, and failure to warn the community. Quote, when questioned in recent days about the shortcomings disclosed in the inquiry by the Times,

a spokesman at the Union Carbide corporate headquarters in Danbury characterized any suggestion of the accidents causes a speculation, and emphasized that Union Carbide would not contribute to that speculation. Cool. Cool. The spokesman went on to state, responsibility for plant maintenance, hiring and training of employees, establishing levels of training, and determining proper staffing levels. Rest with the plant management. Oh, it's actually India's fault.

It's actually India's fault. Yeah, let's con. Yeah. Now, the Times spoke with VP Gokal, the CEO of the Union Carbide India, to try and parse out just how independent the so-called subsidiary really was. During his interview, they noted, quote, at perhaps a dozen points during a two-hour interview, he read his answers into a tape recorder, saying he would inform the parent corporation's Danbury headquarters of what he had said. He also made notes of some of his comments and said he would send them to Danbury for approval by Union Carbide lawyers. Okay, so.

That doesn't sound totally independent. Investing. I know. It sounds totally above board. It sounds like standard practice. And yeah, seems, seems cut. It's, I can't. Legit and cool.

I cannot talk about it. No, it's just so fucked up. It's just so dark. Yeah. Rip Roaring Funnest episode. Ugh. The things that you tell us, Robert, it's upsetting. Yeah, it's not great.

And then we're just supposed to go home after that, you know? Go home, maybe, you know, get some bolt cutters. And then the only advice you have for coping is to buy bolt cutters. Everybody could use a pair of bolt cutters. That's all I'm saying. Your eye. That's all I and Werner Herzog are saying. Now, the New York Times further notes that Union Carbide had several direct representatives

on the board of Union Carbide India, including an EVP of the American company. Mr. Gokal confirmed that the Union Carbide Board of Directors reviewed reports regularly from operations in their Indian subsidiary and made numerous safety decisions, such as the decision to shut down the refrigerator to save power and free on. Yeah. In March of 1985, the Indian government passed the Gas League Disaster Act, making the Indian government the only representative of victims in and outside of India. Eventually, the government reached a settlement with Union Carbide.

The company took moral responsibility and paid $470 million to the Indian government. Wow. Now, this was instantly controversial. For one thing, it was based on the idea that only 3,000 people had died and 102,000 people had been permanently disabled. The real figure in both cases was, of course, several times that high. The NIH notes, quote, upon announcing the settlement shares of UCC rose $2 per share, or 7% in value, had compensation in Bhopal been paid at the same rate that the asbestosis

victims were being awarded in U.S. courts by defendants, including UCC, which mined asbestos from 1963 to 1985, the liability would have been greater than the $10 billion the company was worth and insured for in 1984. By the end of October 2003, according to the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation Department, compensation had been awarded to 554,895 people for injuries received and 15,310 survivors of those killed. The average amount to families of the dead was $2,200. That doesn't even cover, like, funeral costs, but sure.

And when things like that happen, especially, you're just like, this is just like PR for them. It's not, you know. Yeah. It's just PR. Yeah. It's just PR. It's just the hefty PR expense of like, no, I think it's taken care of.

Yeah. The fact that Union Carbide did not care about what had happened became even clearer in the immediate wake or in the weeks following the disaster. See, when you kill 10,000 or so people in the space of a handful of days, it tends to be bad for business. The Bhopal plant had already been slated for decommissioning. They were slowly winding down production and removing equipment, but there were still thousands upon thousands of tons of toxic waste and equally toxic pesticide ingredients to be dealt with.

Prior to this disaster, Union Carbide had dumped its waste into 21 unlined pits on the site. Now, this is fucked up by modern standards, but it should be said this was the standard practice in the U.S. back then, too. So, unlike with their failure to install a computer monitoring system, we can't put that one down to Union Carbide valuing Indian lives less than American ones. Whoever. Industry-wide stupidity. Industry-wide stupidity.

Yeah. Got it. In 1977, though, the company built three proper solar evaporation ponds and started piping waste directly in. These ponds had a liner, but it was thin and it broke immediately, which allowed the waste to seep into the ground and eventually into the groundwater. Farmers complained that the runoff was killing their cows and their crops. And then, when the disaster hit, Union Carbide abandoned the factory and all of the poison

inside it. And there are literally pictures of giant sacks of toxic chemicals that they left lying out, unguarded, and exposed to the elements. Many of those sacks are still lying around the factory to this day. Wow. The tanks and vats filled with deadly poison weren't emptied until 1989, and 360 of the tons of the worst waste was finally locked up in 2005. The vast majority, yeah.

So, my head, my heart, okay. So after this happens, is the area, in fact, people aren't allowed to live there, or are people living there? Oh, of course not. No, no, nothing's changed. I just wanted to make sure that everything was just as bad and that people were moving in. Yeah, no.

Next door to these huge bags of toxic waste. Yeah, almost nothing was cleaned up. The factory remained. The poison seeped into the ground water. And as you might expect, leaving all this poison around in the middle of a densely populated city has had some long-term negative consequences. No. Yeah, shockingly.

I know. That one really threw me for a loop, too. In 2018, Atlantic writer Apoorva Mandavili wrote a great article about this, called The World's Worst Industrial Disaster Is Still Unfolding. She traveled to Anu Nagar, a neighborhood directly across from the old chemical plant. I'd like to read you the introduction from her article, as it does a superb job of humanizing the long-term impact of all this poison. Please do.

From the wooden bed outside her two-room house, Muni Bee, the grand-dom of Anu Nagar, has a wide lens on the devastation. Muni Bee's bed is less than 200 feet from a massive pit that UCC filled with toxic sludge. Close enough to witness the damage, the Gandapani, dirty water, has wrought. Right next door is 15-year-old Faiza, who didn't speak for the first five years of her life and still has heart palpitations, dizzy spells, and headaches. The young woman who grew up two doors down, Tabasum, now has a toddler who doesn't eat

much or speak or cry and has seizures. On the street is Obais, a spindly-legged 13-year-old with black pustules all over his body, so painful and grotesque that he rarely leaves the house. Across the street from him is 12-year-old Tasib, who is intellectually disabled. And then there's Najma, the sweet young woman who lost her mother to tongue cancer and now sits in front of her house all day, smiling and occasionally shouting out gutter-algebra to pass her by. And then there is the house where one daughter has fused bones in her legs, and another has

a hole in her heart. Okay, and are they still living in the area? Yep, yep, and it's slums that are around there. This is not where, it's a big city, there's a lot of nice parts of Bhopal. The slums where poor people can afford to live, many of them are directly around and surrounding the plant. Right, and the plant is still operational, or is it just there? No, it's just there.

Nobody's cleaned it up, nobody's built anything on it. And full of toxic waste, like a fucking, like an abandoned amusement park that's killing people. Yep. That sounds like a horror movie, I would, an abandoned amusement park that's killing people. Yeah, it is. I would see that movie.

It's like a Stephen King book, yeah, absolutely. God, okay. This is- Current data. Yeah. Suggests that 44 communities in India at least have had their ground water corrupted by toxic levels of solvents from the old Union Carbide factory, or plant. Canadian researchers are in the process of conducting a long-term study in mortality,

birth defects, fertility, cancer, and other ailments caused by the old plant. The study, which has involved upwards of 100,000 people to date, suggests that folks who were exposed to the gas or to the water near the plant have 10 times the rate of cancer compared to other groups. So on a long-term basis, the kids who grow up in the slums around the plant and drink the water have the same cancer risk as people who were actually gassed on the night of the disaster. Dow Chemical Company bought Union Carbide in 2001.

They merged with DuPont in 2017. Well, that sounds safe. Today, Dow- That does sound safe. Yeah. Sounds like everything's gonna be fine. Okay. Today, Dow claims that the responsibility for cleaning up the mess Union Carbide left behind

lies with Union Carbide India, which is now called Ever Ready Industries India. Ever Ready, for their part, blames Union Carbide and their owner, Dow Chemical. Dow also regularly suggests that the state of Madhya Pradesh should be responsible for cleaning up the site. The state claims they can't afford to do that, and has convinced the federal government to name Dow in a curative petition demanding $1.2 billion as restitution for the original inadequate settlement. On their website, Dow still touts the old Union Carbide line that a disgruntled employee

caused the accident. They steadfastly refused to admit any responsibility. Quote, Dow acquired shares of Union Carbide in 2001, seven years after UCI-I became Ever Ready Industries India Limited. Union Carbide had no assets in India at the time of the transaction with Dow. Dow never owned or operated the UCI-L plant site. Activists, on the other hand, argue that when Dow bought Union Carbide, they assumed all

of the company's liabilities, as well as its assets. It's unlikely that any satisfactory resolution to the case will be reached as long as Dow slash DuPont continues to have enough money for all of the lawyers. A recent Greenpeace report estimated it would cost $30 million to clean up the remaining waste at the old Union Carbide plant over a period of four years. Last year, Dow DuPont made $85 billion in profits. Cool. Well, I mean, if Dow's involved, it seems to be like an upstanding thing.

I'm wanting to watch a NASCAR race all of a sudden. I'm like, really, DuPont? Oh my God. Yeah. Big names. Big names. Yeah. Good NASCAR suit, that DuPont company.

Oh, yeah. Good Lord. Well, good to know that 100 years later, Union Carbide, alive and well, unlike all of their casualties. Well, like 30 years later. Oh, sorry. I was looking that the company was founded in 1970. Oh, yeah.

They've been around a minute. Yeah. And I was wondering too, this is, again, you had another morbid exercise, but if you Google Union Carbide, I'm like, how much money do they spend trying to push those results out of the first Google page? And they managed to get the Bhopal disaster is not mentioned at all until six results down. Cool.

Yeah. So, if you're wondering, are they still evil? Yes, they are. Well, that's great. Well, how are you feeling about this all, Jamie? I feel absolutely, I honestly feel sick to my stomach. This is, I mean, I want to do more reading about this and the fact that, yeah, just the fact, I can't believe that there's, I mean, not to, you know, it's kind of false equivalence,

but like, why have I seen so many documentaries about the Triangle Factory fire and nothing about like, it's just, it's upsetting. I mean, Triangle Shirt Waste is an important one to understand for like the history of the labor movement in the US. Of course. But I think Bhopal is just as critical because it talks about what's still going on to this day, you know? You can tie like that horrible garment factory fire in Bangladesh that killed all those people.

Some of the same kinds of things going on in terms of like cost cutting and just like, they don't care as much about those people. So less is done to protect them. That's just kind of what happens. Well, I feel absolutely sick. How do you feel? You know, I'm going to pour some more coffee in a little bit, if you want to, okay. I should have, I don't know if we've mentioned this on my get.

You've been wearing a fuzzy bathrobe this whole time. Yeah. Look. Do you remember that time you told me about one of the most horrifying things I've ever heard about in my one human life whilst wearing a fuzzy bathrobe? I mean, I read about it whilst wearing a fuzzy bathrobe. I'm glad that you're comfortable. We live in a system in which nightmares are allowed to occur on a daily basis because

it's cheaper than trying to prevent them. And in a system that's sociopathic, there are two logical responses. Products and services. Well, those are logical for other reasons, but the two logical responses are make yourself comfortable and buy bolt cutters. I'm actually going to do it someday. I'm good. Okay.

Well, yeah. No, I feel terrible, but I love your robe and I'm going to get some bolt cutters. You can get decent ones for cheap. It's just the really nice ones won't trigger the alarms or set off the electronics and stuff. So depending on how the collapse happens, are they pocket size? I can't say I've ever used any. You can get ones that are small enough to fit in a small backpack that aren't huge. They have a variety of sizes of bolt cutter.

Well, that's fun. I might rhinestone handle. I want to set mine up and personalize it. The revolution should involve rhinestone bolt cutters. I feel strongly about that. I think that that would be a real iconic thing to do. Yeah. So everyone listening at home, revolt in your own ways.

Definitely consider it a pair of bolt cutters and a fuzzy bathrobe. God, sorry about this one, gang, this was extremely heavy. Yeah, it's a lot. You want to plug your plugables, Jamie? I mean, it feels just wrong at this point, but yeah, but everything does. But yeah, I guess we only have two years to live, so I may as well. Sure, you can listen to the Bechtel cast with Caitlyn and Durante and my podcast about the portrayal of women in movies.

Every Thursday, you can go see my show, Boss Whom is Girl, in Scotland and in London all summer long, and all that info is on my website, JamieLoftisIsInnocent.com, and JamieLoftis help on Twitter. That's all. Beautiful. Well, I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK, sometimes tweeting about bolt cutters. You can find this podcast on the internet, along with all of its sources, at BehindTheBastards.com.

You can find us on TheGram and the Tweets at AtBastardsPod. You can buy T-shirts, cups, gloves that you can use along with your new bolt cutters, at tpublic.com. We don't have branded bolt cutters there yet, but I'll talk with Sophie about that. We'll see what we can do. Yeah, she's nodding. She's really into the idea. Beautiful.

Well, until next week, stay angry and buy bolt cutters. I love about 40% of you. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside this hearse we're like a lot of goods. Are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass.

And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space, with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.