Doomed to Fail - Ep 65 - Engineering Disasters Part 2: Tragedy in Bhopal

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

This week, Farz takes us to 1980s Bhopal, India, where thousands of people were poisoned by the air outside of a Union Carbide pesticide plant in the Bhopal Disaster. It's just what you think might happen. The buck was passed over and over again, but essentially, water got into a gas tank, and the tank leaked; clouds of poison chased people and animals around the town leaving many dead and many more hurt for life.  If you google it you will see some really terrible images that we didn't include. That's on you. Some sources = https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/12/bhopal-the-worlds-worst-industrial-disaster-30-years-later/100864/Bhopal | Issues | Dow CorporateDow & Bhopal Tragedy | Issues Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail]   Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California, first is Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. There we go. We are on track. Ready to get going. It is 7 o'clock here. It is fire for you. It is already dark. It feels like dinner time. I know. it's the whole thing who's this for is this for the farmers yeah i can think so it was like something with the farmers so they would have more daylight or something and then now they have less daylight but like i don't really know and i know that we voted for it in california to not do it anymore because like arizona and hawaii don't do it and then that is stuck in

whatever somewhere in D.C. because there's someone, some Republican who has one to make it national that you have to do it. So like the fact that we voted that we don't want to do it doesn't matter because that guy's like in the middle of like ruining everyone's day. Oh my God. So annoying. I really hate this. But whatever

we're stuck with it. Cool. Well, let's go ahead and kick things off. Welcome to Doom to Fail. The podcast we cover two stories, one historic, one true crime, about events that are doomed to fail. Join here by Fars and Taylor. How are you, Taylor? I'm good. How are you? Being very official and formal. I'm good. I'm good. I've been in very doomed to fail

headspace because I've literally just rubbed in my research. And so I'm like already You look a little scary right now. It's dark. You could be wearing a cloak. I don't know. I'm not sure what you're wearing. You're wearing it. A little hoodie. Very low cut tank tap and a hoodie. So I don't know. It looks like you have demon horns because you have that bull behind you. It does look scary. And I close. And the missus is watching. TV in the other room and so I'm closed the door so now there's no light at all in here so yeah you have a lamp do you have a no I have this thing here let me turn this on maybe this will make it better here does this look better I mean it doesn't I mean that's weird what is that like a fake fish tank no it uh it has like it's like

It's a humidifier thing. Oh, I have one too. Mine looks like an egg. Here's mine. Fun. Yeah, it's one of those. With my FSA money. I'm going to hold it under my face.

Wait, your FSA paid for that. Is it cool? Yeah, dude, they pay for humidifiers. I did not know that. For your health. I'm a sucker. I paid for this out of pocket. Should enough.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm good. we had i went to a birthday party today for one of florence's friends uh there was a horse you liked it did you ride the horse oh god no gross it's 2023 there's literally no reason to ride horses um no fair fair my most there's i was thinking my most traumatic child you go tell me was when we had to do it we did like a camp field trip for like a weekend my elementary school and at that time i was like super fat was like a pudgy little thing and there was a part where we had to go like ride horses and that was part of the camp retreat and i was so embarrassed that i

couldn't get up that i was like i'm scared of horses so i was like i'm not going to ride and so me and like there's one dad just stayed behind so because i wouldn't have to get on the horse that's really sad now here i am now you are living in texas yeah no i like to think that there's like some ancestor of mine from like 500 years ago um ago some like farm girl in europe who was like this fucking sucks fuck this shit and i'm living her animal free dream and i'm happy to be carrying that for her good good you're doing your ancestors proud um yeah living inside with uh conditioned air of all things it's wonderful i have this humidifier shit you're all set uh i think am i the first you know today

you are what are you going to be consuming coffee actually or no I'm drinking tea but coffee is my I try to stick to a theme so my theme is coffee in real life I'm drinking tea got it got it I'm drinking water because I'm actually drinking water and because it's topical to the topic I'm discussing which is topical of water that's good to me okay well let me I'll go ahead and kick things off this might be a bit of a long one actually yeah i think doing the tight 30 okay so we are back to engineering disasters today and actually i know i thought about like splitting it up the way you did yours the

volcanoes so i was like uh people just get bored of listening like engineering stuff and then i was like i started going down a rabbit hole about this one specific disaster was like this is too good i got to keep going and so here we are whatever you skipped a week and it's fine there's no rules There's no rules. It's just right. Yeah. Outback City Cals. So this one is like the kind of an engineering disaster that like really sparked my interest

engineering disasters because it is so horrific and so traumatic in the magnitude of it. And the scale of it was so huge and the amount of issues and reasons why it happened was so obvious and transparent. It was like a weird convergence of like horrible, horrible outcome, one of the worst in human history mixed with so many different. ways where it could have been preventable that wasn't realized and so i'm going to this topic but i will say that i'm going to be referencing some images for this and they are going to be disturbing so like google them if you want to but you don't have to um and put them on my social but it'll be optional yeah yeah and also there is um there's a ton of like um youtube content out there about this disaster as well as a 2014 Martin Sheen and Cal Penn and Misha Barton movie that's made about it.

So it could be fun to go watch. I heard it's mixed reviews, but it should be interesting. Not if those people will make sense in the same sentence, so that is exciting. Well, the events happened in India and Cal Penn was like a fake journalist during that time. Oh, I mean, it's hilarious. I feel like I should plan to have nightmares about this. I've been having nightmares that I missed our friends champagne toasts the night before their wedding. like that's my nightmares at the moment so i'm real excited to have an actual nightmare yeah let's add

on to it then so the topic i'm going to be discussed okay so my whole point was go look at the youtube videos because i i think if you were to see the imagery of what i'm talking about it would really paint a picture for you of like what was going on and what it must have been like to be in this situation so the topic we're discussing is called the bo-paw disaster bo-pall is spelled b as in boy H-O-P-S-N-H-O-P-H-O-P-Rty-A-L-B-P-P-L. So it is widely considered... I'm so sorry that I laughed because P-4-Bardi is disaster. Cool. Well, because at first I was going to say P-4-P, and I was like, you can't define it with whatever, you understand.

Indeed. So this is, this is widely considered to be the worst industrial accident in the world. And it came in a really strange time. It came during this weird 1980s, greed is good, corporations fucking over the little people. Chernobyl was just two years, a little over two years after this. And so there was like a lot of things that were like falling apart. The domino was falling up like these shitty companies doing shitty things and getting away with it. And this was the worst of that.

Like worse than Chernobyl was a big deal. So the disaster we're going to be. discussing took place between December 2nd and December 3rd, so of 1984. So it basically started at like 11.45 p.m. on the second and like ended like 1 a.m. on the third. So it's just like it falls within that kind of time bracket. And it happened in a part of India known as Madhya Pradesh, which is a basically it's like a shanty town. Like it's really not even like a city like picture picture like hovels like hooverville era kind of homes and that's basically what it was one thing i thought about when i was researching this um this episode was

how there's like a form of privilege i never thought of before which was i was never raised next to a pesticide plant a chemical factory uh nuclear power plants like none of that stuff no totally i was just talking about that with my husband like we're so lucky that we have walls and i know like i said that to my 500 year old ancestor but there's plenty of people that don't have walls you know they live in those like corrugated steel shantytowns all over the worlds move into people you know that's basically what this was actually looked into the cellar it it's actually a term that was coined in like the late 1980s called environmental racism which is basically the convergence like four factors i didn't write the factors here but it was

something of the effect of companies trying to maximize profits, meaning they needed to acquire land at a very low cost, the people who were in that area having no political power and not having the ability to be mobile due to poverty. So all these factors kind of come towards this environmental race. It was like, let's put this horrible, horrible thing next to these poor people in India who literally live in like cardboard boxes because they don't have a choice.

Right, and they can't leave, which we talked about with like disasters before like or like living in unsafe spaces like if people could move out of philip michigan they would but they can't tell their houses you know like there's there's nowhere to go right so like you're in a lot of cases yeah so the main antagonist of the story is a company called union carbide which sounds like an amazingly evil corporation it sounds like one of those robocop movie corporations oh my god totally and union carbide they were a chemical manufacturer and they're most it most of it did this for industrial use and in 1969 it built this factory in bopal to produce a type of pesticide called seven s e v i n which

that name sounded familiar to me i think it's like a i think that's the brand name but it's also used like a bunch of other stuff i think it's like roach spray and whatever it's like all it's all that kind of stuff part of the production process of creating seven includes the use and creation of a chemical known as methyl isocyanate, which sounds really bad because it is. It goes also by the term MIC. But MIC is like an internal nomenclature. The science world knows it as methyl is cyanate. And that's going to come in useful and handy to know that later on.

MIC is a colorless flammable liquid that is very, very bad for human health. If you come in contact with it. and either it's liquid or if it's heated it's in boiled its vaporized form these side effects are a lung edema which is basically drowning in water in your lungs while you're above ground burning of your eyes your nose your throat hemorrhaging of your lungs which means you drown with your lungs full of blood instead of water this time overall it has a very very high death rate if it comes in contact with someone and there's no antidote for it there's no way to mitigate is that as a gas

as a gas yeah oh yeah and on december 1st 1984 employees of this factory started feeling kind of the milder effects of mc poisoning they'd complain of chest pain coughing irritated nose eyes and throats and so they started investigating it so by late december 2nd it was concluded that somehow water had found its way into a tank called e 610 610 which each 610 had two sister tanks that were all next to it. This is the one that became contaminated with water. And at that time, it contained 42 tons of MIC. That alone was problematic because that's actually not how you're supposed to store it. The entire capacity of the tank is 60 tons, but you're only supposed to store it half full. Because the other half has to be inert gas to prevent water from getting in and oxidizing and corroding the chemical compounds and releasing his gas. I think I kind of get that because they don't like they don't like fully fill up our propane tank you know it's like the gas is in there and then there's like air or whatever yeah there's a really good reason for that the reason for that is exactly what we're going to start like there's like

70 reasons why this happened and that is one of the obvious reasons why it ended up happening but it also shows 70 reasons why these happen yeah but it also shows at the baseline of like how obviously preventable so much that shit was just don't do the thing that you're told not to do and you should be fine, but you compound that with the other hundred things you weren't supposed to do that you ended up doing and now you're fucked. So again, 42 tons worth of this liquid compound is in this tank called E610. Water being introduced to MIC has the ability to create a chain reaction and immediately reacts to it and it starts vaporizing the liquid MIC and turning it into a gas which generates heat,

which increases pressure. Make sense? Mm-hmm. Yes. So this night, they noticed that the pressure inside of E610 had increased from 2 PSI to 10 in the span of 30 minutes. These guys were like, this is a mistake. It's a faulty reading. Like there's a, the pressure gauge is faulty.

That's the only reason. But also, they already knew people were getting sick. Like, people were already falling off from mild versions of those poisoning. So they should have known something was going on. It sounds like, well, it sounds like they should have had some sort of canary, right, to get sick first. That's true. We should always have one canary cage above every M-I-C tank. Yeah. I had to have something else from what you just said. Well, it sounds like they should have, like, been aware that, like, things were happening. It'll come back to me. Keep going. well so by 1145 p.m. on December 2nd it was clear enough that something was going on that they reported their supervisors they had an issue with this tank and the supervisor oh i remember my thing oh go ahead I'm so sorry do you remember and did you watch this Chernobyl show I feel like that you might have watched I've seen like two of the episodes there's like a whole part of it where they're like how whatever like they're measuring like they're measuring like they're measuring like they're measuring you're measuring

like radiation and they're like if it goes past like you know 15 then like it's really really bad but so all the measurements like went to 15 and they were like well it's not that bad because they didn't go past 15 that's a made-up number but you know what I mean but none of the machines could even read further than that so when they finally got another machine it was like 3,000 but like they never would have they wouldn't have known what the machines they had because they didn't go up to that number yeah yeah again it's like it's like one of like a thousand things going wrong the results of this kind of stuff happening i'm gonna close that story now that it's open makes you feel like someone's gonna start

running at me so at 1145 p.m. on december 2nd again they had realized there's there's probably something really wrong they went to their supervisors and said hey we had this issue but at that time there were 30 minutes away from a tea break so at 12 15 a.m. on december 3rd was the scheduled tea break and they said like drinking tea literally like drinking tea and they were like Like, let's put this on hold. Let's put a pin in this. We'll come back to it after tea time.

But, like, again, this is a chemical chain reaction. It's happening at the speed of sound. Like, there is no time. Right, you can't take a break. Yeah, this is not like, let's go check out the Black Friday sales, then come back and deal with this. Like, it doesn't work that way. The tea break ends 30 minutes later.

So it's 12.45 a.m. on December 3rd. And at this point, the pressure in the tank had gone from the 10 PSI, which was the latest reading to, 40 PSI was really bad. It's like about the burst because the amount of vapor that's being generated is too much. So at this point, gas has started being vented into the atmosphere already because the seeds couldn't handle that volume of pressure and so it started leaking out of the tank. Overall, 30 tons of gas had seeped out and been bent into the atmosphere before any alarm bells were sounded. So usually what ends up happening when we're at a facility like this where it having an

issue could have impacts further than the factory itself is that the alarm bells are connected to each other. So if you were to sound an all hands alarm inside this factory, everybody inside the factory would know something was absolutely to try to mitigate the issue or run away. And it would sound an alarm outside the factory. So everybody that's around the town would also know that something was going on and be able to run away but right that was also one of the safety issues was that they disabled the two pieces to the one two punch of it and so they sounded an alarm internally and then one tiny alarm went off like a split second outside and then it was disabled and because the system has been disconnected from each other meanwhile everybody at the factory was running upwind

away from the factory the town was downwind so the factory people knew what was going on and nobody was giving the alert of the all hands to anybody outside the factory so gases leaking out and as as it starts kind of settling over the the city people in the city started reacting to it obviously and the police reached out to the folks of the factory and said hey we've got some people getting really sick out here what's going on over there they said nothing to worry about it's all good everything's fine like this whole attempt to trying to cover things up started basically immediately as people were starting to flee and like i mentioned before you're shanties they're living in like cardboard boxes or like corrugated steel like they're trying to run like nobody even

has a car they're like trying to run away from this thing and you're running away from something that you can't see right so you could see it because it was it was denser than air which also meant that if you were young or infirm like in a wheelchair you were obviously dead like because because it was denser than air so it would come it would settle lower on the ground in the air calm and so you're gonna get a heavier dose of it and add to that the fact that the local hospital when they started seeing initial reports of this exposure and these illnesses they had no idea what was going on I mean they don't know they don't know exactly what

seven the pesticides made out of. They don't know what MIC is. Again, that's a marketing language. That's not actually what the compound is called. They actually thought they're getting with the spread of an ammonia leak. That's probably what is going on. That was basically their best guess. And when they called the factory to figure out what was going on, they said it's MIC and they're like, uh, okay, like I don't know what that is. So sure, we'll just deal with the symptoms, I guess. Yeah. They should have been, well, they should have been super prepared for that, right? Let's live next to it. Yeah. Well, that was the thing that later came up once, obviously, all this stuff goes to trial, is they were like, they couldn't be prepared for something that was so impossible to happen.

Like, it was, there were so many safety precautions that had to be bypassed for this end up happening, and we're going to go through those one by one. And so that's why they never dealt with it. They never got to figure out a solution for this, which really the solution, you'll, you can see figures of this later on when I bring up the Atlanta particle about it. but the solution would have been to put giant sheets of fabric up like high vertically and then douse them with water and then that's what's like kind of capture the gas in the fabric so you could actually breathe around there which yeah it doesn't seem that hard it's a solution yeah i mean that's something that they have in their homes right right exactly they could have yeah think about you can just wrap that around your face probably like you just wrap I think a water around your face.

I mean, I think you might be waterboarding yourself, but otherwise it should work. Yeah. One distinction of Bo Paul is that it is also one of the most densely packed cities in the most densely packed country in the world. The Chanty Town, these were just workers around the factory. Like, they were just like, you just wake up. I mean, the town literally was built around this thing. It was like the factory was kind of like the central nucleus of the entire city, which is why it had such dramatic impact, because if it leaves a factory, the only place it has to go and settle is this tiny town that's right beneath it.

As people start kind of dropping, so too do the animals. So basically it turns into a zombie hellscape. So like all their livestock is dead. Every animal around them is falling down. Apparently it's turning some of the leaves on the trees black. Like it looks like hell on earth is what the eyewitness survival statements of this have been about what would it look like. And there's a lot of difference of opinion in terms of the death count. So some sources put the death count somewhere around 2,200 people like that night. Others put it closer to 5,000. So it's somewhere in that range. I've also seen 3,600. So it's somewhere in the 2 to 5,000 person range, like that initial first night.

In addition of that, roughly 41,000 people became severely, severely disabled. People needing life support for the rest of their lives or organ trans, or organ trans, or plants and stuff like that and then nearly 600,000, 574,000 people were injured as a result of this. So they had to receive medical attention. It was the entire town. Like it was literally the entire town. There's a photo you should find that is haunting and terrifying and it was taken Is it a baby? Yeah. Did you see it already? I saw it. Just the baby's face in the dirt? Yeah. Yeah. So that picture was taken by a pretty well-renowned famous photographer called Raghu Ray. And he, they were basically putting together mass burning pits to like destroy the bodies because there were so many bodies available. Like the system had, there was no infrastructure for something like this. And this guy took this picture that ended up becoming basically the image that was the face of the Bhopal disaster. What did you search? You just search Bhopal? I just, yeah, Bhopal disaster.

It's like the first thing that comes up is that poor baby. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the way that with Auschwitz, it's always like the train tracks that show the way that is, like, that picture became the endemic picture. And nobody knows that baby is. Usually the entire families were dead. So a lot of the, I wouldn't say,

right, his whole family is probably dead. Yeah, it was like, it would be like a kid who has like seven siblings and two parents and he just woke up in the whole film. dead for some reason it didn't affect her so nobody knows the kid was um the Atlantic also released this awesome photo op-ed of what happened this was in 2014 it was called bo-paw the world's worst industrial disaster 30 years later it is totally worth googling you can get pictures of what it looked like back then you get pictures of what it looks like now it looks terrifying right now it looks like this plant is just like this weird abandoned it looks haunted the whole place

who's fucking haunted which it probably is so all this goes down and people are obviously very very upset union carbide mostly tries to absolve itself of any blame they held to this theory called the worker sabotage theory of what ended up happening they claimed that it was nearly impossible for water to enter the tank without someone actually forcing the water into the tank and their argument is that some random worker decided to kill off the town and hope the water line to the side of the tank that's that's their argument yeah so right now realistically we actually don't even know what ended up causing this we know that the plant was very poorly maintained and we also know that the government of india basically shot off access to the plant and conducted their own investigation so

nobody actually got to investigate what was going on outside of the government itself and the government was the one that's also suing union carbide for billions and billions of dollars over what they ended up causing so the government's take on this was that there were workers who were about 400 feet away trying to unclog a pipe somewhere and they were using force induction water to clear that pipe and they weren't using what's called a slip line plate which prevents water from leaking outside that pipe and then water from that ended up getting inside this tank they there's also like an obvious cultural bias here so apparently very few of the plant operators understood English, but all these safety equipment, safety

manuals and the writings on them, the warnings on them were all written in English. And so nobody actually could read any of this stuff, which is like an obvious... It's unbelievable. I know. So simple. Again, so many of these things have to add up. Yeah. So in addition of this, there were also other safety precautions that were there but not operational at the time.

So for example, most of these plants like this have what's called a flare tower, which is basically what it sounds like. It is a high tower with a flame at the end of it. And so if gas is escaping for one of these tanks, it's supposed to be routed up this flare tower, and then it gets burned off before it can be released into the atmosphere. But in this case, the player tower. I've seen those in like, I see those. Yeah, yeah.

It's, um, so any time. It's like the flame. Yeah. At the very end, yeah. It's like usually you would see it with like an oil derrick, for example. yeah yeah so but in this case that flare tower had been in operational for about five months could not work did not work five months again a million things adding up yeah it was this is another insane one so it was later discovered that all these tanks had refrigeration units because again

there's several things that have to come together for this to happen so one it has to that has to be a certain temperature it has to have a conductive force introduced to it in this case water like somebody didn't release the pressure valve on tight like there was a hundred things that had to happen so there's a hundred things that they do ahead of time to prevent this from happening one of those was refrigerating the units so all these units individually have refrigeration units attached to them to keep them at a steady temperature in this case it would have been four and a half degrees Celsius in this case the refrigeration unit was broken so it wasn't working so it was actually right we're at ambient temperature which was 20 degrees Celsius at the time

and also this was outlined in the manuals but the manuals weren't English so Nobody knew. So Union Carbide was later on sold to Dow Chemicals. I'm going to get into a lot more detail here, but for the time being just know that they were sold to Dow Chemicals. They actually still maintain a website that is just about Bhopal. And I went to it. I looked it up.

It was really, really interesting. I've never seen like a corporate, here's our take on this event that like we're not responsible for at this point anymore because it's been like, for it's been like, for. 40 years now and we've been sold off to two different companies. So like they still, they're still maintaining their innocence and what they talk about on their, on their website is they leaned heavily on that worker sabotage theory. So it's interesting because I look at the circumstances, this whole environmental racism thing. I look at where they set this plant up. I look at how they treated their workers.

I look at how everything was in a state of deterioration and breakdown and nobody gave a shit because they're like, fuck these people. if they die they die it doesn't really matter all this stuff it's just obviously like you you were the responsible party and you did this but when you look at this worker sabotage theory it kind of makes sense like i feel like many of those things can all be true you can be awful and shitty and evil and also you didn't do like this so yes one of the things was again none of these safety things were in in effect but the very root cause of this was water going to into the tank that started the chemical reaction and then everything fucked up before that everything fucked about that but how did the water get into a sealed tank that was

specifically designed to not let water absorb into it so right one report stated that for water from the workers cleaning that clog pipe 400 feet away to have entered the tank the water would have had to have reached the height of 10 feet before it could have go it was impossible it was an open space it would never would have gotten to 10 feet high and so they were like it doesn't make any sense how water could have gotten into this thing in addition of that there was this guy who was the plant operations manager who was responsible to manufacture of mc and in 2017 there was like another court case there's so many court cases like i'm going to blow past the court cases later on because i'm like you'll all just not off to sleep driving and listen to this if i don't

but in 2017 there was a court case and this guy who was a productions manager for the first time came out and said this was not this was not an accident that somebody physically did this he actually named a guy that you think did this and you know on one part I'm like well you were the plant operations manager responsible production of this stuff so like you have an incentive to say this wasn't done X this didn't happen accidentally somebody deliberately did this also it's 2017 so like why what if you're gonna lie why do it now I'm presumably this guy's like 80 right so a part of I think so like maybe it's true I don't know Yeah.

Because nobody can definitively say how water got into the tank. That's all we know. We do know that the day- Wait, has anyone been able to look at the tank? Yeah, yeah, but that's the thing. Not just like the government. No, just the government has. So that's what you can call by this saying.

That's my suspicious question. Yeah. They're saying that, like, let us investigate this thing. Like, it's our plant. We would know better than you would. And they were completely cut out of the investigation. by the government. It's worth noting that the government also owned 22% of this company. And so they also have an incentive to say it was all this third party because they don't want to pay out, pay out the victims.

100%. Yeah. That checks out as BS. Right. So Union Carbide came out initially with a $350 million settlement offer and to set up a victims fund. They said that if they did it this way, they would essentially earn interest over the term of 20 years. The two of $600 million, then they could settle all liability claims for the disaster and care for the victims. The government of India said, no, fuck this, we're not going to accept that offer. We want $3.3 billion, which Union Carbite obviously turned down because that was more or less their market cap at the time. Right. So part of India's reason for why they were, the disparity, the 10x disparity in the dollar figure was how bad this event actually was. So as I mentioned, livestock, flora, fauna, everything was basically contaminated or if it wasn't contaminated, it was already dead.

So in addition to that, the people who survived and were still in that area, they couldn't use the land. They couldn't fish because they thought the fish contained MIC. They couldn't eat the livestock. They thought that had MIC. And so as a result of this, they're also dealing with a massive, massive food shortage. And because nobody had contemplated a disaster of this scale and size, I mean, think about, like, 600,000 people show over your door one day and are like, we all need medical attention, the most severe case possible. Nobody was equipped for this. And so as a result, they also had to build these makeshift to hospitals.

They had to bring in doctors that were basically like low-tier doctors, the worst of the worst, because there wasn't enough doctors to go around the entire city or the entire country. is the actual cost to India's government was tremendous because they also had to re-home these people, half a million of them, we could no longer lose as part of the country. It was all terrible. So ultimately, two parties settled on, I think, it's like a pretty modest amount of money. It was $470 million plus $17 million to basically fund a hospital dedicated to just treating these victims. so pretty light like just shy of half a billion I think and at the same time as the civil

cases going on there's also several criminal cases going on so the CEO of Union Carbide is a guy name or was a guy he died in 2014 was a guy named Warren Anderson and he's like the quintessential Gordon Gecko like when I looked his picture I was like man like you just look like you killed a bunch of his 80s brown people like he was charged with manslaughter by the government of India and an extradition request was sent to the United States, which the U.S. was like, we're not doing this. We're not going to send this guy to go to jail in India. So ultimately, only seven people who worked in Union Carbite were charged and facing the actual tangible consequences. And these were just the Indian guys. These were the Indian executives

in India. Yeah, like they were the only ones they get a hold of. I mean, I'm sure if you're living in Bo Paul and you're an executive, you're probably not like a war in Anderson who's like probably got like seven homes in the Hamptons. So these guys ended up getting a negligent homicide charge. They faced two years sentences, which they were actually paroled almost immediately. And they've each received a $2,800 fine before they did or didn't do. Wow. It's interesting because today women in that area when they're lactating, MIC is still found in their breast milk. Like it is, oh my God. It is a absolute hellscape even to this day. And since all this ended up happening, obviously the factory's been shut down. That tank hasn't been

destroyed. It's still kind of sitting there. Recently, I think it was like 2016, 2017. Some investigator reporter, basically all these people who are still live in this area, like this thing is still poisoning us. Like, there's still chemicals here. They're leaking out of these tanks that have not been operational for 40 years. They're in the groundwater. And this one investigated reporter went there to kind of investigate a spot. I can't imagine how fucking terrifying it's had to be. Like, I hope this guy makes a million dollars on his reporting because the thought is just going here and walking around it. You've seen pictures of it, right? It looks absolutely nightmarish. Yeah. Oh, my God.

Yeah. So he was trying to investigate if there actually is still chemicals there that are being leaked into the ground, he ended up getting crazy sick. Like he had to be hospitalized in the ICU just by walking around this place. So it is still doing something. It is still there. It's still leaching poison into the ground for these poor people. And it presumably always, well, it's been a bit completely, completely abandoned. The company itself, like I mentioned, was sold off the Dow Chemicals.

It is not operating in Bhopal anymore. So that's the latest and greater. Right. So the people there, like, don't even have any jobs anymore. There's nothing. The financial impact of all this, you lose your family, you lose your home, you lose your animals, you lose your fucking vegetation, like you can't drink the water. Like, it is, I don't even know how they survive. Yeah.

A lot of these folks, they barely do. Yeah, I mean, they were barely surviving anyways. A lot of these folks ended up moving to other parts of India, but there's still a city there. Like, there's still people that live there. It's still a, I'm not going to say a thriving metropolis, but it's still a metropolis in some ways. but it's like you're just living there with the fact that 30 tons of your everything around you is contaminated with the ship that doesn't go away it also doesn't go away like it's like nuclear radiation just kind of sticks around totally uh that's terrible but the reason i kept bringing up

the documentaries like i was trying to paint a picture of what this city looked like it's like every it's not their fault i mean look you can't blame people for being poor but it's it just looks like a hellscape like it just looks like hell on earth And then you add into the fact that, like, all the city is now poisoned and it's just, and your animals are all dead. It's just like the whole thing is just such a nightmare's picture. And think about it, it happened like one o'clock in the morning. So, like, you're in bed and all of a sudden you can't breathe. Right.

In your nose is like turning blood red. And like people could have just died and not even noticed. No, I don't think so. It sounds like a horrible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because this reminds me a lot of, um, of chlorine poisoning. Have you heard about

chlorine poisoning at all? Uh-uh. So when chlorine is vaporized and you breathe it, it does to your eyes, it does to everything inside of you what the small doses you get if you open your eyes under water in a pool do. It just basically incinerates your insides. Like it just flames you from the inside out. It's a horrible way to die. It's one of the worst

ways to die in other man. And that's also what this was essentially. So, no, you would know, you would know you died relatively quickly, but you're dying of hemorrhaging inside of you. And so bleeding out isn't going to be a fast process. Yeah. Oh, it's terrible. There's a great chlorine story. I read it like forever ago, and it was like this couple somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Texas.

Nobody was around them. And this train transporting a bunch of chlorine derailed and it vaporized the chlorine. and then it just like was around this couple's house and they couldn't leave and they had like sit there and I think they'd both died but I'm not I'll research that and do an update but it's crazy crazy scary yeah well it didn't we some of those things happened recently like wasn't there that train in Ohio that had all that like gas yeah I think that was point too oh yeah it's really bad it's really really bad stuff so and also there's like this element of like industrialness to it of like it's just I don't know there's an environmental race some piece of it the greed is good piece of it the fact that it's just all bad it's like it's like the worst parts of human nature kind of colliding in creating this situation and also the name is terrifying Union Carbide is coming to town to build a factory it's like get the fuck out of here with that

only you absolutely not you fucking movie villains get out of town with Warren Anderson with his amazing oh wait let me google him he does have amazing hair he looks like a CEO like this guy was born to be the CEO of a company that kills a bunch of brown people oh i see him yeah a little older than a gordon gecko but i think yeah he was named after um born g hardy nice yeah um he lived to be 92 and died in florida at a nursing home in Vero Beach. Always.

Yeah. Anywho, that is my story. Thanks. Again, the, the doomed to fail part being water in MIC. If you have MIC and you're storing it in your backyard, do not introduce water to it because it will cause a chemical reaction. It'll kill your whole town. Yeah, be careful with that, with that. Don't, I mean, someone has to live next to a chemical plant, but like, I don't know, get a canary.

Stop doing chemistry in your backyard. That's 100%. I saw like a thing that was like a house in, I don't know, like Palo Alto that was like really expensive, but it was a total tear down because it used to be a meth lab. You couldn't go into it. Why can't you go into a meth lab? Because you'll die because it's full of meth chemicals. Are those bad for you? Yes.

Were you supposed to smoke it? yes but it's like made in a lab like so if you if you have a meth lab in your house your house is contaminated oh yeah yeah i remember uh what's his face had that um what's the same david david shapiro no um david shakespeare no uh the the wake up guy what's the same david david branch branch branch um crash yes david She had a meth lab? Well, when they moved into the Mount Carmel compound, they reported a meth lab in there, so the police had to come out and clear it and sanitize it.

Got it. Yeah. That's what I'm saying this about for you. I made an absolutely horrifying photo on Mid-Journey while you were talking, and I don't think I'm going to post it because it's terrible, but you want to see it? Yeah. Always. Okay, wait.

How do I? This is, you're going to just hold on to your butts. Oh, my God. What did you search? I just wrote Bhopal disaster, and the other ones are kind of tame, but this one's awful. It's like a child surrounded by skeletons that are standing up. It's very scary. It's like very scary. Imagine. Oh, we're not talking to silence.

This is a silent portion. Hey, when it's sharing. This is a silent portion of the podcast. Yeah, there you go. There you have it. Well, thank you first. I'm excited to hear more about, um, the more engineering disasters. More to come.

I add a gas disaster to my image journey. Let's see what that produces. It's more of the same. I mean, these images are haunting, but they're also not that far off from what I picture in my mind when I think of like this event. Yeah, totally.

I mean, like there are like literal pictures of like people walking through the town and that animals are all dead. And then there's pictures of dead people everywhere. Yeah, not good. we won't be posting all of those, but they'll exist. Damn, that one's freaky. Cool.

Well, is there anything you want to read out to them before we cut off? Yeah, we had a couple Instagram messages. Our friend September and my cousin Lindsay sent some ideas for you that I'll send to you. And then our friend Andrea said, yes, she agrees that third parties are ridiculous for presidential elections, but it wouldn't be a problem

if we use ranked choice voting. So something to think about that is the ideal way to do it is ranked choice, but we would Yeah anything that improves. So here's saying my general thesis is that anything that would increase voter outcomes and are less likely to be diluted by other people's interests in those outcomes isn't going to happen. And range choice voting is one of those things. Yeah. And I think it's a certain specific. like people who are making that happen. Right. So,

not me, but it's out there. Like just this week. I didn't do it. What? No, no, we didn't do it.

I mean, like just this week, there was like a county where the predominantly black areas kept running out of ballots. Yeah. And they could bring them like 100 ballots a day, a good hour.

You're like, what? It's so obvious we were doing. So obvious. I haven't. But, you know. America. Anyway, yeah, that's it. So thank you, Andrea and Lindsay in September. And if anyone has any other ideas or thoughts, please let us know. We're on Instagram at Doom to FailPod and then at Gmail, doomed to fail pod at gmail.com.

Perfect. Awesome. Logged and cut this time.