Well There‘s Your Problem - Well There's Your Problem| Episode 25: Bhopal Disaster (Part 1)

Episode Date: May 9, 2020

In this half of an episode we talk about the worst industrial accident in modern history, the 1984 Bhopal Disaster. Also we learn some organic chemistry. The Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod Link to the Slides: https://youtu.be/vCKVreNqMjI image credits: slide 1 chemical plant By Julian Nyča - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17238674 king bhoja By Bernard Gagnon - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33358272 taj ul masjid By This file is not in the public domain. Therefore you are requested to use the following next to the image if you reuse this file: © Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9646626 bhopal city of lakes By Deepak sankat - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38548396 train station By Suyash Dwivedi - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82889986 insecticide pump By Photographed by User:Bullenwächter - Hamburg Museum, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28973407 union carbide gas By Union Carbide; scan and commentary by Don O'Brien - Country Gentleman magazine, 1922-10-07, via Flickr: Gas Lighting, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15488089 MIC tank By Julian Nyča - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17238598 tea time By joyosity - Tea at the Rittenhouse Hotel, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2217142 bhopal sunset By Sankalpbhatt - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60345777 give us anderson By Obi from ROMA ,LONDON - BHOPAL, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3165085

Well, I think I think it's good if we get the like groans of despair in to like set the mood and call. Oh my God, dude. All right. I love to work a full shift at the podcast factory. I feel like a fucking die. Welcome to welcome to our double shift at the podcast factory, where our one podcast took much longer than we expected. Man, we got to get a union or something. I truly was not expecting who's the podcast

two hours and 50 minutes. If you're not subscribed to the Patriot at this point, just go fuck yourself. I mean, what if people what if people don't want to subscribe on the basis that they got to feel obligated to listen to three hours of our bullshit? You should feel obligated. I put a lot of work into that. That's true. We did put in a lot of work. Yes. All right.

So welcome to Well, there's your problem. A podcast about engineering disasters with slides. Which is a disaster. And it is in of itself a disaster. A very long running podcast. Yes. Yeah, this is our 25th this is our 25th episode special. Yes, I meant in runtime, but that too. Oh, God, yeah.

So I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the person who's talking right now. I have a civil engineering degree so I can talk about engineering stuff. My pronouns are he and him. Yes. Oh, you're done. Yeah, I am done. Alice called her Kelly. My pronouns are she and her.

I am the person talking now. And I don't I don't have shit, man, except another podcast called Trash Future and like an incipient dropping out from a law degree. The college is dumb. Listen to our bonus episode if you want to hear about how dumb it is. That's right. I am William Anderson. I am an old man.

Anderson, except that that other L is a zero. On Twitter, my pronouns are he and him. And I have a mathematics degree and an economics degree from Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey. And in case you're wondering why I sound like I'm on the verge of death, it's because I've been talking nonstop for three hours. Every time, yeah, every time I get done streaming or recording or something, I have like a full body tiredness.

And I'm like, what the fuck? I didn't do any work because my brain thinks that work is only when you hit stuff with a hammer. And so I like, I'll be like, why am I exhausted after merely performing for seven hours? You know, I found is that podcasting is still easier than a Zoom meeting. Like a Zoom meeting will wear me out in about 25 minutes. But none of us are wearing pants, also, is the thing. Ross was last I saw.

Yeah, I was wearing pants. I am still wearing pants, like lumbering towards the recording room, like a big foot footage thing. Oh, God. All right. So what we're looking at the screen here is a bunch of rusty chemical plant equipment, right? Hmm. You discuss it's been abandoned for a while. And that's on account. Why is it been abandoned? It's been abandoned for a while because they can't sell it

because it was built so crappily, right? Outsourcing works. And that's because today for a 25th episode anniversary, you've been at this for almost six months now. Holy shit. We are going to talk about the worst industrial accident in modern history. Yeah. And threatening. Were you with it? We are going to talk about the blowpaw disaster.

And yeah, this has been very much fan requested. Oh, yeah, because the fans are masochists, right? They want to, like, hear the thing that will give them depression. And boy, are we going to give you depression? Oh, yeah. Consider this is your content warning for everything. Everything is. The this is this is going to like this is going to stick in your head for like at least a week.

Yeah, absolutely. Even more so than the other stuff we cover. I mean, this is truly horrific and bruised up. This is this is like a few things. This is pure fucking evil. Oh, yeah. Decades. Absolutely. But worst of all, I'm going to teach you all some organic chemistry. Just no noping out pulling the record.

You know, I specifically didn't go to med school despite that my parents pleased that why don't you go to college and become a doctor? No, I haven't fucking learned it anyway. Yeah, organic chemistry. It'll get you. Oh, also, just so you know, because of not to do Twitter review, but because we discovered a species of Twitter person called the intersectional landlord, we all got canceled and like lost a thousand followers and shit like that because taking that out without acknowledging that.

OK, fine. That's true. Fine. I would like to acknowledge nothing. Yeah, but we're we probably we probably are because of the of Alice switching the goddamn news intro. That's true. We have to acknowledge it somehow. Oh, yeah, we'll do that part. Yeah, play the East is Red as loud as you can. OK, fine. So anyway, we have to we have to start with our usual segment.

Our new usual jingle, the goddamn news. All right, more, I want more. Oh, you want more? You want more? I've become so powerful now that I have a button that plays the East is Red at maximum volume and just a hand at any time I want. Look, we just recorded a three hour bonus episode. We should keep this a little bit brisk. Anyway, so.

So our first piece of news today is Denver, Colorado, April 21st. Someone didn't call 811 before they dug. This is why you should listen to our fucking podcast about sticking into shit. It's so easy, guys. You call a phone number and you're like, hey, man, am I going to hit something? And they say, yeah, I'm probably there. Ah, I got that.

Fix the post. Yeah. But what did they hit this time? They hit 811's fiber line and took out 811 for the entire city of Denver. Denver, Denver, there's something. Maybe it's just like the the shit wind wafting in from Greeley. But there's something weird in Denver, like it's the same city that gave us the FBI agent doing a backflip, his gun falling out and like it's shooting a dude in the leg. And ever since I saw that story, I was like, yeah, no,

that's a that's a fucked city, like in terms of violence, because Denver, the city is just like an enormous suburb, hell. And the people who live there are actually relatively cool. And then entirely surrounding Denver are reactionary chug, just in any direction. World County, which tried to secede in 2011. Yeah, I forgot. Yeah. Well, they're reopening now in defiance of Jared Polis' Shelter Play Sword.

So we'll see how that works out for them. They're also unique in that, you know, a lot of urban renewal schemes were pretty piecemeal. Denver actually demolished their entire downtown, except for one building in the 60s for redevelopment. Every single building came down. It was it was dumb. You shouldn't do that.

Anyway, missing out on a historic like warehouse district right now. Yeah, exactly. Well, we'll talk about the Jabber's Canyon Historic District, I'm sure, at some point in the future. That was Omaha. Anyway, so our next piece of news. So as Trump said something offhand about injecting disinfectant or sunlight or UV lights, just fucking just stick one of those blue restaurant bug zapping lights up your asshole and it'll kill the coronavirus.

There's an Instagram influencer who talked about like, oh, yeah, sunlight up her butthole. So I assume Trump is one of those guys who has a, you know, a horny Instagram. I don't think she was putting stuff actually up her asshole. I think she was just like fun, right? Yeah, it was just like she was exposing her asshole to a yellow sun in order to gain powers.

I'm goat seeing the stars. That is that is about the best message humanity can hope to send the universe. It's just like a bleached asshole just gait into the future. This is this has been very this has been an interesting story to follow so far because like Trump got this idea from somewhere that you can inject. I think he's got it from literally he got it from while he does video of him getting the idea where he's waiting to go on stage and he's looking at the banners that are like how to like kill the virus

on surfaces that are like, man, you can kill this thing with bleach or even just sunlight with time and you can see him putting it together and being like, man, why is nobody thought of this? What if you just put the bleach in the thing? What I was thinking is he somehow got a message from the the. So any vaxxers are the tip of the iceberg. Right. There's a whole community out there.

Of people who advocate drinking bleach. Yeah, he's a miracle. They call it miracle cure. Yes, it's one of the like one of the things that you're that they recommend it most heavily as a way of making your kid not be autistic anymore. And I guarantee you that if your kid will not be autistic, they also just won't be alive. Yes. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I mean, a lot of people end up doing this shit.

And like, I've seen, you know, well, he didn't mean it literally. Like, even if he fucking didn't, don't ever like that should not be ambiguous. I shouldn't have to ask to the president of the United States. Tell us to inject bleach. It's so funny, though, that for a while before they were bullied into changing it, the New York Times ran with like Trump's like Trump's comments, controversial with experts. Like they were really going to try on both sides injecting bleach up your ass.

Most experts do not think you should inject or drink bleach out of five dentists. But from our from our correspondents at freedomeagle.biz to an unsignaled that it was very safe. Yeah, by gold, by gold, by gold, by gold, by Bitcoin, Bitcoin and gold, the two safest investments. I just I do want to say, do not inject yourself with bleach. No, and also do not let your parents on Facebook groups which encourage drinking or injecting bleach.

There's a whole bunch of them. Yeah, you got to put the like the child locks on your computer for like your older relatives. They're all parental controls for a reason. They can control the parents parents. The bishop are his parents so they couldn't watch box news anymore because he was sick of hearing it. And in addition, don't inject or drink ammonia or Lysol.

No, and and don't don't don't do any of his like hydroxychloroquine or like resperavir or any of the other like bullshit like folk medicine cures. Although there is one that is extremely funny that they've been trying in California and New York, which is just fucking transgending the shit out of everybody because women die slightly late. Oh, shit, I got to do the like the short East is Red again.

Oh, this is my dream. It's just the East is Red blaze as we like it fucking trans everybody. Forced feminization is here. Is it an effective COVID-19 treatment? We still find out. Look, you may still die. You may still die, but you will be much hotter. So it's impossible to say whether it's a good or not.

Look, I, you know, if I have to be trans to survive the virus, whatever. OK, I mean, like the insulting the insulting thing, right? Like is genuinely that like if Easter dial patches and like, fuck, what's the other one? Spirinal lactone, there's always a supply chain shortage of these things. And like, it's always incredibly difficult to get them prescribed

if you are trans, unless you're just like a dude who has coronavirus and then you just slap a bunch of them on like smoking cessation patches and see what happens. That's the funniest shit to me is just dudes being like, yeah, no, I'll fuck it. I'll try it in the test pill. Look, am I a man? Am I a woman? I don't care.

I just want to grill. God damn it. So yeah, the future is here. Everyone will be trans. That's right. Everybody will be trans and also like injecting bleach into themselves. It's it's taken a weird turn here in 2020. It's not fun here. Yes. Mm hmm.

This is not the turn I expected. All right. So that those three things are the God damn news. I'm never bringing back the old news. I'm just waiting to this one now. All right. We're going to talk about Bob Paul. So an important thing to remember about Bob Paul is that it's not an industrial accident. No, it's a city. Yes.

Where people live, right? Mm hmm. And and still do not like Pripyat or some shit. Exactly. Yeah, it's still there. Founded in the 11th century, named for King Boa Boja of Malwa. This is a cool statue. Yeah, it's a cool statue.

This is him right here. He's got like a cool sword and stuff. Mm hmm. Yeah. Got very pointy shoes. You got big moustaches. Yeah. I mean, Bob Paul now has a city as a population of one point eight million, which is larger than Billy.

So yeah, like twice the size of Glasgow. Yeah, big place. And, you know, it's the city of lakes is what this sign says. Or welcome to the city of lakes. They've got it's it's beautiful. Like I don't want to like I see what we're doing here, right? We're not like we're trying to lend some texture to this and not just like portray the people here as like

sort of like dolls to be moved around in some sort of industrial accident. Or or living in they're all living in poor destitute slums. No, it's like an actual place. It's nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you don't want to. That's one of the worst things I think I'd like any coverage of these disasters is always just like whether it's public culture, too, because like homeland fucking did it

or they showed the main street of Beirut being just this whole. Yeah, yeah, it's just like nope, it's a real city. There's like a Starbucks there. Yeah, it's like a boulevard. It looks nice. Yeah. And it's not that it's not even like we're going in the opposite direction of being like slums do not exist or like people only matter if they have a Starbucks. It's just to say that it is like the texture of human life.

Right. It exists in all of these things. Like you have to you have to have a holistic approach to this and you have to be like, huh, that's a place where people are from. And they, you know, they live there and do stuff there. And it's it's more complicated than just this sort of background setting for something terrible. Bad company did bad thing. Like no bad company did extraordinarily evil thing to a city the size of Philadelphia and and more or less had no consequence, not no consequences, obviously.

But I want the one thing I did notice is I looked at another image of this sign head on and I was amazed at how similar this looks to the Trenton makes the world takes. Yeah. Yeah. Even trying to make the city of lakes. Yes. Yeah. So Paul is home to India's largest mosque. Well, this is. Hajul Masjid Masjid.

You know me from eight 1844 to 1985. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah, it took him a bit of time to finish it. Yeah, it's still still working on it a bit there. Well, yeah, a little bit of scaffolding up here. Yeah, you got to be kind of finicky with the like details. Yeah. Also, its its name is just as just the big mosque. I respect the hell out of that.

Oh, shit. That's that's great. Yeah, I like that a lot. Yeah, it also has this some absolutely wild train station. What the fuck is that? Just is it? Oh, that's sick. Yeah, right. So somebody really, really, really likes a colonnade. Yeah. Well, it's weird because there's this whole like Indian

modernist school of architecture, which really derives, I guess, from Le Coup Boussier in Chandigarh, which which has a lot of forms like this. But this is this is wild because it's all completely completely. I mean, they're useless arches made of concrete and it's like it's great. I love it. I like that this train station. And I mean this with the highest degree of respect. Looks like my worst nightmare of Atlantic City.

Like, why do we beach with that? Yeah, it looks like it looks like doing like, did you ever have to do like cursive practice in school? It looks like that. Just do to do a sheet full of M's. This is this is Bo Paul Habib Ganj. Right. You can see it's written here. We're going to talk about a different train station later.

That's Bo Paul Junction, which is closer to where the incident occurred. Bo Paul Junction is 4.3 miles away, in case anyone's scared. Yes. So you get a cool train station. I like it a lot. It's great. Yeah. But you know, dude, it has two hundred daily train. Good luck. Fuck, you know, you know, the shittiest thing about Indian Railways

is how good they are is that like English people, British people, actually continue to take credit for that. Like, that's that's our thing of where we have to do like an apology for Empire and the Raj is just we'll be like, oh, well, we gave them the railways. And it's like, dude, we we I mean, you personally haven't done shit, but we, whatever that means, haven't been there in 70 years. In that time, the population of India has exponentially grown

and the railways still fucking work. So who's doing the real hard work there? The other thing about like Indian Railways, I don't know if you ever watch Indian Railway YouTube videos. They're always fun to watch. Oh, yeah. Fuck. Well, is it's not so much the speed of the trains that's impressive. Hmm. Frequency. It's the violence of the speed.

Yeah. There's absolutely. Like there's no like, oh, you apply a touch of power. It is run eight to nothing. Yes. You you are going. You are going. There's like dust and wind. You're like going. You're not even going like super fast.

Like, you know, a Japanese Shinkansen or a TGV or something. You're going 120 miles an hour, maybe. But like the violence of the speed, because this is just an ordinary train that's going that fast. Yeah, it's it's it's difficult because everything is so heavy and going so fast. And like you you'll go like because of like zoning being more of a vibe, actually, you'll just go through a market

that like moves around the train tracks when a train goes through. That's cool as hell to me. That is not India. That is no, there's there's definitely I know. I know the one you're thinking of. And like that was what I had in mind, too. But it is also a thing that happens in India. I hope they don't go through it 120 miles an hour.

That's not a big deal. You see it coming through. I would like some more. Just excuse me. Coming through. Just blaring. I think I think I think the one that we're both thinking of is Southeast Asia. I think it's like, I don't know, Indonesia, maybe. I was thinking the Philippines, but I don't think that's it.

The Philippines has some weird railroad stuff going on. Yeah, they do. But the point of this is Bo Paul, it's a city where people live to this day. It's a big place. There's lots of different people who live there. It's not like a huge third world. Like everyone lives in squalor slum. And it wasn't at the time of the Bo Paul disaster.

It is a place where. Yeah, it's a city. Just pick it's a real place, pick a place at random. Right. Like if you take one thing from this, it is that in order to not orientalize this, you have to be like like throw a dart and be like near a city with two million people in it. Like fucking, I don't know, Abilene, Texas. Right. And that's the vibe here. Right.

Disasters happen to real people in real places. We're not. We are trying to do a curative to the matter. Glaziest thing of different places have different safety standards. Oh, my fucking god. OK. Suck a dick, Matt. You pay way too much fucking money to be that fucking stupid. The lives of the people who live in Bo Paul have equal value to yours, or mine, or anyone else's.

And it's insane that that's something that we need to state up front and spend like 20 minutes doing it. But we do, we clearly do. So that's what we're doing. Yes. So this is a 900 year old city. It's older than like any of your, you know, any American city. Mexico City. Well, yeah, anyway, yeah. Anyway, so furthermore, now that we've established that,

we need to ask what are insecticides? Oh, boy. Insecticide. This is an old timey insecticide, this pump to Hickey, right? Well, they got to like mix the two chemicals as they come out of the can. So an insecticide is a substance which is designed to kill insects and nothing else ideally, right? Yeah, you can just you can you can bathe in it and you should be fine. Hopefully.

So most famous, of course, is DDT, which is very safe to everything except bald eagles. Yeah, that's also a lot of other kinds of birds. Yeah, basically, Rachel Carson wrote this book called Silent Spring, which is about how DDT was killing all of the birds and the world lurched in like one of the biggest coordinated environmental policy changes until CFCs from spraying DDT on everything, like in like parts of the South trucks would go by in summer

and just kill all of the mosquitoes as like a malaria preventative to just using it very sparingly, if at all. It does. It does probably cause cancer. And I think it might cause birth defects. And also my grandmother, God rest her soul, continue to use it well after other people had stopped. Yeah, that was my grandmother. It was just like, that's fine.

They don't care. It works. It sucks. Yeah, exactly. She had already been done giving birth, like the Silent Spring was the real driver and literally the only like the big thing that made a difference was it kills the shit out of birds, which is that was enough to swing it. And that's why it's banned in most places now. I believe a lot of areas considered developing nations, you can still use it

because it's very cheap and very effective at killing insects and also birds. Yes. But your ideal insecticide, right, kills the bad bugs and also leaves the good bugs alone, right? Like bees, you shouldn't be killed bees usually. I mean, certainly, like I don't want any bees near me because they might sting me and I don't like that. But like, you know, you want bees near plants, right?

And the other ideal thing is your insecticide doesn't murder people or animals if they consume it, right? Because you use it on crops to prevent the bad insects from getting there. Yeah, fun fact, one of the most common methods of suicide in rural India is like either fertilizer or insecticide ingestion. You want to kill yourself and you just fucking you drink the bad thing. You drink the forbidden soda. Oh, God, I know it's really grim.

Like of not not what I would pick if I'm being honest. It sounds like a very unpleasant way to go because I assume it would be especially quick. Yeah, but I guess it's because you have this thing that is very clearly marked as being lethal or lethally dangerous. It's it's like it's like having a gun in the house, I guess. It's like you have the temptation. And that like that that like seems to make the difference to like impulsive suicide. It does. I mean, statistically, it does when when most people

like when it became basically difficult to, you know, be not to be too grim, but literally stick your head in the oven to kill yourself. Yeah. Suicides drop like, you know, when you have easy access to it, you know, you kind of fill in the blank there. Yeah. So rural India, gigantic access to extremely deadly chemicals as a consequence of rapid, rapid growth in farming and also chemical corporations. Yes. So and we're going to we're going to talk about that.

And but one such insecticide, more modern one, well, not that modern, but which doesn't really harm people so much as it's inject ingested in small quantities. Do not inject this. Do not inject this much like much bleach. So this is something called carbaryl, right? All right. Here's the part that's going to terrify everyone. We're going to talk about organic chemistry.

Oh, fuck. So carbaryl. Also known as one naphthalmethyl carbamate, right? I see some benzines in there. Yes, there are two benzines right here, right? Two benzines. Now, two two benzines. Yeah, two benzines welded together is actually much less toxic than one benzine.

That's a naphthalene, right? So now this is one naphthal, right? Which means there is something else welded into the one slot on the naphthalene, which in this case is an oxygen atom, right? So C 10 H 7. Otherwise, this would be eight. Here's the O, right? OK, the O is here or here is red. Right. And that O is then bonded to a C,

which we don't talk about because this is organic chemistry. The C is implied, right? OK, you can see like right here, there's not even anything there. It's just like, oh, yeah, it's a C. The C is double bonded to an O. That's why it's in parentheses, right? So, OK, this that that is, you know, your one naphthal. And then this whole assembly here.

Is the carbamate, right? And the carbamate is composed of the carbon, the double bonded O, the O. And then this right here is called an anime. No, no, it isn't. No, it's called an aminé. Switch the M in the end. There's a secondary aminé because it only has one front role. Yeah, because there's only one hydrogen attached to it.

If there were two hydrogens attached to it, that would be a regular aminé or primary aminé. And then at the top here is your carbon with three hydrogens attached to it. That is called a methyl, right? So, yes. Yeah, it's anti. Yes. So, you have a you have one naphthal. Methyl

of the carbamate, right? Organic chemistry, you know it now. You're flashing back. I still flashing back to like double award science and having to like try to figure out what the fucking mole is. You're telling me that a mole made this molecule was like, cool. Yes, Avogadro, the mole. Thank you. I didn't like that.

Let's let's balance some equations, guys. It'll be fun. Here's a 40 page worksheet where you're going to balance some of those books. Boom, you've done chemistry too. Now, for some reason, that makes you educated because you can balance equations. The most arbitrary exercise you can give anyone. It's fucking bullshit.

This is it is like teaching math by being like, here's a long list, a long page of like small numbers to add together. Wow, I have to memorize how to use a bomb calorimeter. No, if I got to use a bomb calorimeter, I'm going to read the instructions on the box. You fuckers. Jesus Christ. Oh, my God, I fucking hated chemistry. Anyway, so this is ecology. That and all I learned was all about the native fishes of Pennsylvania.

And my ecology teacher was like, also in the Coast Guard reserves. So sometimes he would just get calls. It was so weird because that was. Oh, this dude knew everything there was to know about Shad and the Susquehanna and would just talk endlessly about like, yeah, like, here's how like here's how like the Pima plateau in Pennsylvania established, like, you know, defines wildlife in the area. And if you go up to Franklin County, you know, you'll maybe see this,

but the best fishing and just I mean, hours. Can I can I interest you in my science elective human anatomy? Or would you like to draw several billion extremely complicated flowcharts of how your body falls apart? Yeah, I think human anatomy should just be called digging for spare parts. Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, I joked on Twitter that the four humours theory of medicine

isn't entirely wrong because internal medicine is mostly just like is the wet stuff in the right place. Exactly. They told me all my bleeding was internal. That's where the blood's supposed to be. Just holding up my organs to the surgeon, being like, can you dust my wets? Have you heard some 41s? Does this look infected?

Boom. Oh, God. I used to listen to that on a CD Walkman going to school. Yeah, no skit, my ass. Oh, my God. All right. So this chemical carbaryl was introduced by Union carbide in 1958 under the brand name Seven, right?

It's S.E.V.I.N., right? Very successful, very successful pesticide found to be highly toxic to insects and almost not toxic to all the humans. Right. Does that kill bees? Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Yeah.

So it's currently banned in many countries, including the European Union and because it's a potential human carcinogen. Andy Rod. But it's very widely used in the United States. Yeah. Not not to be not to be a libertarian here, but isn't like almost everything a human carcinogen? Yes.

Like it's just a thing that's attendant with cells dividing. Like it eat the burger. Eat the burger. It does not explain why I can't get the good Canadian toothpaste in the United States. I keep thinking right about Joe Biden's big public health policy, which is we're going to find a cure for cancer. And then thinking about how if you know any medicine whatsoever, this is like saying we're going to find a cure for virus.

And just I think about that and I get so angry. Nanobots. Handheld proton therapy machines. Yes. Uh huh. Yeah. And a proton therapy myself every day. Inside this particle accelerator.

Oh, there was that Russian guy who got shot in the head with a particle accelerator and lived. Yeah, I did proton therapy to him. Yeah, exactly. That doesn't have cancer. Never had. So anyway, OK, so this gets more complicated. Now, pay attention.

This is the this is the chemical formula C10H7. That's the naphthalene OCO N. That is H as well is the carbon made CH3 is the methyl. Now, how do we get this? Right. Oh, my God, I got some beer cans here. I'm blocking my screen. This is what happens when you do two two podcasts in a row.

Yeah, we try not to take you kind of behind the game too often. But yeah, I got some problem actually. It's a hashtag BTS. I've just I'm piling up coke cans because drama dance. I'm not drinking, but like congratulations. I was trying to cut it back, but today is ruining that. You simply have to become Muslim. And then you will like maybe even if you're not fasting,

you will feel bad enough about drinking that you won't touch the crate, the literal crate of beer that you got. I'm considering it. Well, I'd be ready. Why is no. The easiest way to create this pesticide, Cartier of the is to react a chemical called one naphthal. Right. Mm hmm.

One nap. One harmless thing we talked about earlier. This is two benzene welded together. And then there's an only insanely is safe, right? Like Ben's Benzene is like a friend of the show. We know it is the chemical that's extremely bad. Yes, you stick two of those bitches together and they're fine. Yeah, you stick to them together. They're fine. This is in the one slot, the OH.

I believe this is if you just have this, this is. Oh, this is used in anti-depressants, I believe. Hey, we found the things turning the frogs guy. But I believe if you move this OH to the two slot here, so it becomes too naphthal, then it's highly toxic. Oh, that's not so good. Organic chemistry is a bitch. I would simply not move it.

Mm hmm. Don't do it. Bugs are our friends. I don't care anymore. And you react this relatively safe chemical with another chemical, CH3, NCO, methyl isocyanate, right? No, no, no, no, no, no. So you got your H3C, that's your methyl, and here's your isocyanate. Right. Yeah, I noticed that.

I don't like the roots cyan and chemicals at all. It doesn't make me feel happy things. Cyanate is different from cyanide. Really? But they can. Sort of, you know, they're easy to turn in from one to another through various. Yeah, that's why I don't like the root chemical reactions. Yeah. No blue chemicals. Absolutely no blue chemicals.

That's a NCO as opposed to cyanide, which is HCN, right? Although there are H's, there are C's, and there are N's in here. Just in the mix. It's all about how you it's all how you mix it. You know, so. But the thing is methyl isocyanate is very much not a harmless chemical, right? So for one thing, it reacts vigorously with water, especially at temperatures exceeding 25 degrees Celsius.

That forms other dumb organic chemicals and CO2 and heat. The rate of reaction increases with heat. If the the M.I.C. Methyl, I'm going to call it M.I.C. from now on. If M.I.C. is in excess, it forms extra bullshit organic chemicals, right? It is funny how mean organic chemistry seems to be, right? Like you get into this with the fluorides, too. But like after a while, it starts to take on this kind of aspect of spite

where it's like why I know chemically why you're releasing this. But like why, though, why are you trying to kill me all the time? Organic chemistry, there's a very small amount of organic chemicals, which are very beneficial. There's a very large amount that will kill you in all kinds of exotic and painful ways. So M.I.C. is toxic by inhalation, ingestion and contact in quantities as low as 0.4 parts per million. Exposure symptoms include coughing, chest pain,

dyspnea, I don't know what that is. Asthma. Dyspnea is when you feel weird. OK, I've been doing that a lot recently. Irritation of the eyes, nose and throat, as well as skin damage. Higher levels of exposure over 21 parts per million can result in pulmonary or lung edema, edema swelling. OK, emphysema, hemorrhages, brachylobenumonia and death.

Yeah. So this is like 21 parts per million is like doesn't matter that it's like colorless, odourless, whatever. You just like you just drop dead, right? Yeah. Yeah. Tess, this is according to the Bopal saga, which is my primary source for this podcast by Ingrid Ekerman. Tests on rats turned out to be so terrifying

that the company banned publication of their work. Holy fuck. Experiments have shown that the almost instantaneous death of animals exposed to M.I.C. vapors. They destroyed the respiratory system with lightning speed, caused irreversible blindness and burnt the pigment of the skin. Oh, my God, whoops. We accidentally created like just the death chemical.

Not even a 4D trick around a thing. No, we were just we were fucking around trying to kill mosquitoes. And we we accidentally created rat hell. Well, you were trying to kill. Yeah, that's true. Certain organisms. Well, it's very it's very good. I suppose. Mm hmm. So it is possible to avoid using

methyl isocyanate to produce carbonyl, right? And what you need to do is you need to take the component parts of M.I.C. which are an organic chemical called methyl mean, methylal mean and almost in. Oh, yeah. First, post-gene being the World War One poison gas. No. Mm hmm. And you react those in a different order with one naphthal, right?

But this is a three step process as opposed to a one step process. So it's a little bit more expensive, right? Oh, externalities. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, like for for students, for students, very bad, right? But like like a lot of the First World War gases, it's like it's used there was more psychological than anything else. So it's it's very visible.

It has this big, like heavy dense clouds of smoke. You can kind of you can see it coming. And like it it's actually not very good at killing people either. Like a lot of the World War One poison gases is also like goofy. The like the the World War One chemical weapon process is the safer process. Yeah, that's true. So anyway, what was Union Carbide? So Union Carbide was formed in 1917 as the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation.

It was a merger of two previous corporations, which I didn't write down because I'm a moron. They loved alliteration as we talked about in the Texas City episode. Yes. That's how people remember your name, right? They started many consumer brands we may be familiar with ever ready and energizer batteries, glad bags and wraps, right? Those have been mostly divested since this incident for reasons

we'll get into. You can see here we have an ad for Union Carbide gas. You know, just get a 55 gallon drum to light your house. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Look, we didn't have electricity back then. Well, we did. This is from the 20s. But not everywhere had electricity. I like the big white hand pouring chemicals over India

and the tagline a hand in things to come. This is this is a thing called foreshadowing, as I understand it. Yes. Didn't Union Carbide also operate Oak Ridge for like 30 years? Union Carbide was a very diversified company. They they were in propane. I don't know about propane accessories. It was a pesticide.

They did pesticides. They did asbestos. They did rocket fuel. They also operated Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1947 to 1984. Oh, are they cool? A bunch of people at Hawks Nest Tuttle with a silicosis. Yes. Yeah. Also, like all of the asbestos deaths and all the rocket fuel deaths.

Price of progress. Yeah. So it's Harbour's Monster remainder of the corporation is now part of Dow Chemical and their remnants, mostly manufacturer, intermediate chemicals that we don't hear about. Right. You know, a lot of bullshit, which I assume is extremely toxic and you don't want to hear about you.

You don't want to know about this shit. Just all you want to know is like you see the tanker truck go past and you see the like the big hazard label. And you think, huh, that's not one I recognize. They keep not recognizing it. Yeah, I don't want to think about any of that shit. Yeah. Yeah. Give me a nuclear power plant over a petrochemical plant any day.

Yeah. Ask me about the Ollium Nurse story sometime. Oh, God. Yeah, I don't want to know. We'll talk about it later. Anyway, so let's talk about Union Carbide India Limited. Right. Hmm. It was owned 50.9 percent by Union Carbide.

Forty nine point one percent by Indian investors. Right. So, you know, Union Carbide was making all the decisions here. The plant in Bhopal, which is on this site, which you may notice there's nothing on now, temporarily closed. Temporary to the coronavirus. Yes. Um, so this plant was built in 1969, four years into the Green Revolution.

And the Green Revolution was when most of what we would consider the developing world and you think you would consider it the developing world back then. It's apparently taking a very long time to develop. They were weird, huh? Yeah, I know, right? It's almost like, you know, there's some kind of thump. There's something keeping them back. You know, I don't know what it might be.

The subject of communism. Yeah. Yeah. So this is when a lot of modern mechanized farming in agricultural practices were moving their way out. You know, this involves like fertilizer, pesticides, high yield seeds, not GMOs yet, technically, but basically GMOs and tractors, of course. And this increases agricultural yields.

You know, if you know Norman Borlaug, this is sort of that, that sort of thing. Yeah, we do got to have another disclaimer here, which is that we're not Malthusians, right? We don't think that this is a bad thing because it creates more people in developing countries. More people is good. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to tell you to not have kids because, A, that's against the Lord. B. No.

No, just A. No, the thing is right. We're not doing we are the virus thing here, right? Like it's no of us are doing are not doing that. One of us is advocating for voluntary human extinction. Again, I am not attaching my name to that bullshit. Liam's use. Do not reflect those of will.

That's your problem. None of us are none of us are eco fascists. No, is just an omnicidal maniac. Yes. Which is different from being eco fascist. Exactly, because it's not eco fascism if you believe that everyone should be dead. Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that the Green Revolution and like the subsequent population growth are not unsustainable

because of some inherent trace in humanity or worse yet, something cultural about developing countries. It's unsustainable because of an exploitative profit motive of which we will hear more later. Yes. And say just tossing out food instead of giving it to people. Yeah, weird. How that happens.

If we just gave people food, the crazy it's like fucking all these like potatoes and shit that people are just, you know, farmers are plowing under. It's just like, what if the government who makes all the money and I mean this and the creates the sentence money, money, but you go, and then you bought a bunch of potatoes and then you moved them to people who need potatoes. I have done it. I have solved all economic.

I will be expecting my noble in the mail. Sweden, you can reach out whatever. Swedes are all dead because they didn't socially distance for coronavirus. It's unfortunate. They're racist and gross. I don't care. Norway wins again. So serves them right for doing tepid social democracy.

Yeah. Oh, yes. The Kingdom of Norway, very relevant since whatever, 1637. Now, there are some there are some questions about, you know, linking our food supply so closely to the petrochemical industry, right? Which is, you know, also just doing like doing big monoculture is the other one as like doing like soil erosion. That's that's a big one. That's so good. Yeah.

So it means everywhere. Sometimes also corn. Yes, soybeans and oats of the future. And like I want to put a vapor wave effect on this, but I'm too lazy. But like wind fertilized grains. Yes. I personally, you know, enjoy beans. They're good. He's very good.

Yeah, do some do some three sisters. You know, the technology is for more sustainable farming. It exists or is within reach. The problem once again, is that profit most of being like it's way easier to just grow a whole field of alfalfa, a garbage vegetable no one uses for anything and then all throw it immediately into the trash or plant back in. Look, I will happily go vegetarian to, you know, help the planet.

But you can take my eggs and my cheese or my cold dead hands. Oh, anyway. Something gross. Oh, please. Yeah. I want you to think of cheese as just milk blow. Fucking delicious. Wouldn't that be like delicious? So would be. Yeah.

Just milk blow moving on. Delicious. I'm looking at this. I'm sitting in a cave for five years. Give it to me. I'm looking at this and I see a couple of like what looked like green lakes on this. Is that is that accurate of those? Is that just a satellite within the site?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's one on the bottom. Yeah. And then there's another one on the far side of the like Western road. I just assume that's just some kind of retention pond to avoid like flooding or something like that. I don't think that's OK. Oh, yeah. I don't think that's like full of horrific. Well, it's full of some amount of horrific chemicals,

but like not not an exceptional amount, you know. OK, sure. Yeah. So the point of this is because of the Green Revolution, the demand for pesticide in India was increasing, right? To the point where that big white hand of progress. Yes, exactly. So the point where they maybe they want to manufacture some pesticide in India, as opposed to importing it all from the United States, right?

So the Bhopal plant was originally designed to manufacture carbaryl, right? The pesticide we were talking about earlier. In small quantities, right? And this was supposed to be made from M.I.C. that was manufactured offsite in the United States, imported to India, right, unloaded from ships in Bombay and then transported by truck from Bombay with a police escort.

That was how dangerous the company thought this chemical was, right? Yeah. But since they were they were using it on site in truckload quantities, right? This was considered a light industry. So they got planning permission to build it in this pretty highly populated area, right? Between like what, three hospitals? Yeah, sports stadium, like a marketplace. Yeah, and a school. Yeah, well, that's a lot of houses.

And I mean, yeah, obviously, this is something we would never do in the West. Who would do that, right? Yeah, different places have different safety standards, and that's OK. This is it was astonished that this neighborhood just exists like in the middle of the Refinery. This is Paschunk Avenue in South Philadelphia, right? And there's just like oil refinery all around like these 30 row houses. It doesn't get much better outside the screen.

It's just this is the most egregious one. Oh, so I like the gasometer, though. I hope they keep this when they tear down the rest of the Refinery. They've been tearing down all the like Victorian ones as they find them in the UK. So I'm God, I know. Yeah, they're cool. You know, that's the thing. And for it, but anyway, I saw a picture of some really cool

like Gothic one that was in South Philadelphia a while back. You imagine a Gothic gasometer. TFW, no, goth gasometer. Yes. Anyway. So in 1979, they started scaling up production at the plant and they decided we need to start manufacturing M.I.C. on site, right? Because it's inefficient to have to get the like truck convoy

from Mumbai every week. You have to get the safer truck full of posh gene gas. So they were producing large quantities of this very dangerous chemical and storing it on site in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Right. Now Union Carbide owned a similar plant in a town called Institute, West Virginia. OK, that's where West Virginia State University is. And they just called it Institute.

Yeah, same as State College, Pennsylvania. You know, I love to live in Townsville University, Mississippi. Oxford, I mean, yeah. Well, the city for the university is just called University University of Glasgow is on University Avenue. So yeah, also it's called Institute, West Virginia, because it was named after an HBCU. West Virginia State is an HBCU, which you could learn more about

in a recently recorded bonus episode. Yeah, for only three hours of your time. Yeah. And five of your dollars. Give us all your fucking money. I need it to buy like obscure Russian, like fucking like fire wars and equipment and shit. I just every month I'm in a competition with my own brain to see what the dumbest, weirdest shit I can make myself buy is.

Look, Alice, the first thing you should do is you need to buy a warehouse to store all the dumb shit you buy. That's true. Yeah, I'm just I don't know why I bought all of this. And I see. Oh, God. All right. So from from the beginning, right. This this plant had some problems. Right. Oh, boy. In some areas, it was over designed,

especially in the newly built M.I.C. plant, right? Well, redundancy is safe. More safe is more good. Depends. As we'll get to another part, the one nap, the plant and the part that was building the creating the safe chemical, right? It couldn't get the purity up to the required quantity.

So they had to like truck that in, right? It did not. It did not work. And then there were lots of problems with corrosion. Right. Because they used instead of stainless steel, they used carbon steel. Oh, no. Carbon steel being just regular steel. They used they they did the reverse of where you buy a katana off of Ali Express.

And it's just a stainless steel thing that just like wobbles around. They did the reverse of that and they use just regular steel. They use it. Yeah, exactly. Because they're handling all of these incredibly corrosive chemicals. Uh-huh. Right. And they're putting it through regular steel pipes, which are not even good for like water. No, in a country that famously never gets either hot or wet or both.

Yes. God, right. And they use carbon steel for a lot of the pipes, a lot of the valves, a lot of the other safety critical equipment. Right. Oh, good. So there's there's also a question here, which is like, where is where is Indian OSHA or the Indian Chemical Safety Board during all of this? What what is the power differential that allows this like mostly American owned, sort of like

kind of marketed even as a settler colonialist project thing to just like be like, yeah, we just build it out of this. You know, the Indian government's hoping to get the tax revenue from these highly integrated, you know, giant American production plants, which are, you know, assisting in the Green Revolution, right? Sure. Just to turn Bhopal into Detroit, a city which had no problems after that. I mean, Detroit never had quite

the industrial disaster that happened here. But yes. So. In the 1980s, after this M.I.C. plant was put in, there was a lot of reduced demand from pesticide, right? Because I'm not exactly sure why. I think it may be because they killed too many bugs. Yeah, like that was probably they work too good. We kind of did.

We kind of got too good at pesticides, right? Like I think there are places where we almost eliminated malaria entirely. And then we kind of decided that, well, maybe this is bad because birds keep dropping out of the sky, foaming at the beak and stuff. Oh, is that bad? Yeah, it upsets people. I don't know why, for some reason.

You know, you don't want birds with bird rabies just crashing into your window. Yeah. And they peck at you. And then you got to get a big dumb shot in your stomach to avoid dying. It's just our friend, Derek, suicidal cardinal, but on on mass scale. No. OK, moving on. Now, I want to hear that story. Oh, yeah. We have a I have a friend or rather I have a friend named Derek. He has a house

out near my parents and for the last two, three years, they've had this cardinal that just dive bombs their kitchen window about every 30 seconds every day for the past two years for about eight to 10 hours a day. And they have tried everything. I had just this one suit. He just always crashes into the window. And I just don't know why.

But that on a on a mass scale would be scary. About to about to violate the Federal Migratory Birds Act or whatever. What what archdiocese is in charge of, do you know? Harrisburg, so you can get a help out of this. Oh, man, you just you just took the best joke of this episode away from the line I've been saving up all week. Oh, my God. It's going to be another long episode.

Ruined our lives today. Anyway, so since they downscaled production of pesticides, right? They started laying off workers. They started using employees to cover jobs they weren't trained to do. They started stockpiling dangerous chemicals on site, including M.I.C. Right. And I see K.E.Y. M.I.U.I.C. And it was stuck in my head.

Oh, good. And everything in the plant, you know, was broken and leaking. And people just sort of accepted it and worked around it. Right. Mm hmm. Just like sidestep the big pool of cyanide. Yeah, don't don't step on it. Excuse me, cyanate. So on the site, there were three big storage tanks for M.I.C., right?

Each was sixty eight thousand liters. I don't know how many gallons that is. It's a lot. All three of them were sited under underneath a big concrete pad, right? Mm hmm. Right. Two were for storage. One was for storing bad product in case, you know, the the M.I.C. from the plant didn't meet spec.

They could dump it in that one. It's 15,000 gallons each, by the way. Here's a picture of one of them. This is this tank 610, right? This is actually the tank that caused the issue, right? Why is why is the tank that caused the issue just in somebody's yard in what looks like a recent picture to me? Oh, well, we're we're going to learn about that.

I don't want to learn about that. I want to, like, feel good things in my life. Well, too bad. Alice, you suggested we should do this podcast. I did. I did. This is technically your idea. Yeah, that's literally true. Just because you do the showrunner stuff was actually my idea.

Please redirect all complaints to you. Yeah, that's right. As your fault, we got canceled by the Raytheon Ferry Landlord Caucus. Yeah, and people are going to be so confused about why the news jingle was replaced with the Easter's Red. That's why, because the landlord's. So all right, how is this supposed to work? Each of these three tanks was never to be filled more than 50 percent

with M.I.C., right? The remainder of that was supposed to be nitrogen gas under pressure, right? Imagine this is a big keg of Guinness, right? Oh, does it have the little like plastic ball in there? Yeah, it's got the little, yeah, yeah. Oh, I can't read the widget. Yeah. Yeah, it's got no, no, it's a keg. It doesn't have a widget.

It has an external supply of nitrogen. Oh, yeah, I'd love to have my. You're thinking of a can of Guinness. Yes, my M.I.C. on Nitro. Yes, my. M.I.C. on Nitro. Genuine draft M.I.C. So this was pressurized with nitrogen at two PSI, right?

The nitrogen is going in and that's portion itself against the walls of the tank, as well as the nasty chemical, right, and it's fortunate itself out. This has two reasons for it to do that, right? Number one is that if you wanted to get the chemical out, all you had to do was open a valve somewhere up here and there'd be some kind of like tube that went down there, it would force itself out

because of the pressure of the nitrogen. Number two, if there was anything trying to leak its way in there, like, say, groundwater, it wouldn't be able to get in because of the pressure of the nitrogen because getting water in here is a very dangerous prospect because it reacts vigorously with it. Yes. Yes, it would cause a bad reaction, which should not happen. Now, in addition, there were other safety protocols to make sure that if water got in there, it wouldn't be a big deal.

One of which is that these tanks had to be refrigerated, right? To blow five degrees Celsius. That would mean if some water got in there, which even mine from our previous episode, everything leaks. You know, but if some water got in there, the reaction would be slow enough, it wouldn't matter, right? Because, you know, it's supposed to be below five degrees Celsius. Ideally, will below that.

And then there was a third safety system, which was the relief valve vent header, the RVVH, right? So should something happen where this tank went over pressure because of some reaction or something? The the MIC would be sent out of the tank automatically through a safety valve, which would blow at 40 psi. And it would go into a chemical scrubber, which would cause chemical reactions,

which would reduce the potency of the MIC. And then it would. I never got this quite straight. It wasn't clear from the research I did. It would either be vented directly the atmosphere or go through the flare stack. So they just burn off the excess. Yeah, exactly.

But the atmosphere, like you're driving a Subaru SDI. Yeah. Yeah. I know you, Suvi boys. We know you want some bro off valves by a GTI being an adult. Now, the folks who were at Union Carbide, India Limited, didn't want to have the tanks in the first place, right? Because storing this amount of dangerous chemical on site is dumb. You shouldn't do it. This is like the other ones who have to actually see it.

They have to like be aware that it's by people's houses and schools and shit. Yeah. And like one of the one of the number one things about handling dangerous chemicals is you want to handle the smallest amount of it possible, right? If you need to have it. Like ideally, you just don't have a huge tank of it. If you have an extremely dangerous chemical, you manufacture it as needed and try and react it into the safe chemical as quickly as possible, right? And that is that is what they did in the Institute West Virginia plant

is they manufactured M.I.C. as needed. They had a few small tanks full of it. And they they just introduced it into the production supply as needed. Right. That's not just sitting there waiting for something terrible to happen. The one time where the like just in time supply chain is actually prepped out. But I thought the India plant followed all the safety regulations of the Institute West Virginia plant. Oh, there's going to be a story about that later. Oh, good.

In June of 1984, the refrigeration unit that refrigerated this tank and the other two tanks was shut down to save money on energy. One block pulled out of Jenga stack. Yes. It's not like anything was going to get in the tank. It was still pressurized, right? Right. They got some extra safety systems. It's fine. In October of 1984, tank 610 suffered some kind of leak. Right. It couldn't hold pressure anymore, which meant two things. Number one, it was no longer under pressure so that groundwater couldn't get in.

Number two is they couldn't get the M.I.C. that was sitting there in the tank out. Because it's only meant to come out with the pressure from the nitrogen. Yeah. It's like having a big keg of unpressurized beer and you don't even have like the hand pump. Things are shit. They make the beer skunk. They're garbage. College sucks. Listen to our bonus episode about how much college sucks. Yeah. In which to record it, we were all wearing the Belushi Animal House college sweatshirt. I'm going to make that the picture. Yeah. All right. So you have a dead keg of instead of beer, highly dangerous chemicals, right?

So there were 42 tons of M.I.C. inside this tank, right? Jesus. Since they needed at least one tank to store bad product, they decided to shut down the plant for maintenance. Yeah. This included shutting down the flare stack and shutting down the chemical scrubber. Of course. Oh, no. So you've just now, you have three safety systems and you have systematically disabled each and every one of them in sequence. And in addition to a wide variety of other safety systems which were broken, which I didn't, I didn't list here because I didn't have time to because there were so many of them.

So they shut the plant down for maintenance. And then in November, keep in mind this thing broke in October. In November, they resumed production with only two of the M.I.C. tanks in service with this one still full of 42 tons of M.I.C., right? Of course. The flare stack was still down and the scrubber was also still down. So there was an attempt to restore pressure to this tank on December 1st and it failed, right? So, you know, some further maintenance was required to get it up and running again. Yeah. You send a guy down there with like a rag on a stick, and he just goes in there and he plugs the hole. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Every episode I invent a new kind of shit job. Like that's the guy that has a union. It's like the international brotherhood of like cyanate leak tank pluggers. Every job at this site was a shit job by the time this accident occurred. No one was having a nice time. All right. So, as we should talk about these two safety systems, right, which worked in tandem, right? This is not the flare stack at the Bob Paul plant. This is just a picture I found. Yeah. This is the same technology. It's a big fucking chimney that does the thing. Yeah, exactly. The gas goes up and then at the top it catches fire, right? And that's good.

That's the good thing to do. Flare stacks are your friends. Yeah. It looks bad. It looks like all sinister and shit to just see just a giant fire, but this is good. Mostly people, anti-nuclear people get afraid of cooling towers when those just produce steam. Yes. I'd much rather have a nuclear power plant next to my house than any petrochemical plant, which actually is next to my house. So, yeah. Flare stacks are your friend. They turn dangerous organic chemicals into CO2 and water, right? And maybe a few other relatively harmless byproducts, right? Yeah. As in it's harmful in 40 years rather than you drop dead.

Yes. Yes, exactly. Relatively harmless. This man is your friend. He fights for freedom. Yes. They do this using fire because fire makes a lot of dangerous organic chemicals much safer. A lot of chemicals, much better to have them catch fire than leak without catching fire. Just stick oxygen to stuff. And if it's fine. It's fine, yeah. Some flare stacks and some chemical plants are used only for emergencies. Others are used to flare off byproducts you don't want, like especially in oil production platforms, they'll flare off methane because... What are they going to do with it, yeah?

A, it's dangerous to just release it as a gas. B, it's actually a less potent greenhouse gas if you burn it as opposed to just releasing it to the atmosphere. I keep coming back to Shell refineries in Scotland where they have been flaring off ethane because the economics of liquid natural gas are now so fucked. But like literally it's just you turn the big dial and then what would be methane that goes into this and gets burned off just is now ethane because you can't sell it. God. And the most environmentally friendly thing to do, of course, is to keep the oil in the ground. But this is the second most environmentally friendly thing, I guess.

Yeah, it's just to create a cool fire. So, MIC is a special case, right? If it's incompletely combusted, right, it can now turn into hydrogen cyanide gas. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. That's why I'm afraid of the root word cyan. Yes. And hydrogen cyanide gas we usually just call cyanide, which is not good to spew into the atmosphere, right? Oh, no. No, no, you shouldn't do that. Just don't spew cyanide into the atmosphere. Yeah, so it's like don't spit, but on a much larger scale. Well, if only the Nazis had listened. So, the MIC had to go through this thing called a scrubber, which is this diagram here, right?

Goes in the bottom. This vape. Yes. And then there's an inlet here at the top where they add a solution of caustic soda, right? Is this the good caustic soda that I like? Or is this the bad caustic? This is. I didn't put down the chemical formula, which was stupid. Could Alice consume this during Ramadan? Well, could I consume caustic soda? I mean, once? There you go. Well, in case you want to mix it up with the coke. I can catch a bullet in my teeth once.

Is the idea is this gas goes up through the doohickey. It reacts with the caustic soda. It's turned into relatively harmless byproducts. It goes at the top, right? If for some reason there's too much, it goes out to the flare tower and we hope for the best. At least that's what I understood about what I read. I don't know if that's strictly accurate because I'm not a process safety guy, right? It seems reasonable. It seems like a decent amount of like harm reduction, right? Yeah. The gas has to percolate through this whole bed of ceramic pebbles here to make sure it gets in contact with the caustic soda.

Caustic soda falls to the ground and it goes through a drain. I think it's recirculated, maybe. I'm not sure if it's a catalyst or not. You just have a tank full of caustic soda with a bunch of other shit bonded to it. It's fine. But that is very unclear about precisely how this unit worked. What I do know is this was capable of neutralizing 8 tons per hour of MIC, right? Now, there's 42 tons in the tank. Keep that in mind. So this could do 8 tons an hour safely. Now, due to the extended maintenance, this unit and the flare stack were turned off. Oh, cool. So if something goes wrong, it just vents the atmosphere. Possibly going through some pebbles,

which don't have anything on them, just pebbles. Yeah, you hope the pebbles just slowed down long enough. Spoiler alert. All right. So again, you can see photocopied several times. You know this is official. As I mentioned before, we have the RVVH here. It's the Relief Valve Vent Hever header. Excuse me. That's for emergencies. It's been a long day of podcasting. We have the Process Valve Header, which is for normal production-related release of gases. If you got to vent off some excess gas, right? And then you have this important here. This is the Jumper line. What's that? So at some point in May of 1984, the Jumper line was installed to allow production to continue even when one of the lines, the PVH or the RVVH, was down for maintenance.

Since everything on this plane was rusting to shit because it was made of carbon steel, as opposed to stainless steel. So this is just like a hose hookup from one thing to the other? That is probably another carbon steel hard line, but yes. Cool. This line was not supposed to be there. It was not in the Union carbide manual, but you know, it's a little bit cheaper than doing the real fix, right? So at some point on December 3rd, the supervisor on duty who had only been there two weeks. Has he been cycled out from another plant? He's the poorest of a bitch. He decided the tank problem might be that there was some blockage somewhere in the lines, right? So rather than a problem with the tank itself. So he orders those lines to be cleaned out with

high pressure water, which a worker goes and does so at 8.30pm. You know what though? This really does remind me of Chernobyl in that like you can see this has a long lead up to it in which you can see them pulling back everything that could have stopped it. And then it would have been something. If not for this, it would have been something else. And it just all comes snapping back into place. Yes. So all right, they closed off the valves to the tank and to, you know, the other production MIC, right? But they did not, as procedure demanded, install something called a slip valve cover, right? To further isolate the tank. A slip valve cover is, if you've ever seen, you know how like pipes join together and there's like a whole bunch

of like bolts around the connection. So this is just a metal disc that goes in there. You unscrew all the bolts after you've drained the pipe, you slip that disc in there, you close all the bolts again, right? Yeah. For redundancy. For redundancy. Like it's a very aggressive, like you can see the integrity of the slip cover, right? As opposed to the valve, which you can't really see what it looks like. You know, this is for redundancy as opposed to, you know, it's like locking out a panel. Yeah, it's a failsafe. And it's also difficult to install and uninstall. So, you know, no one's going to fuck with it unless they really have to, right? Which corollary nobody's going to install it if they don't have to.

Yes. So yeah, then the supervisor did not instruct them to do so, even though procedure demanded that. So, you know, they're shaking hands with danger. It has a danger. Thank you. Down, down, down, down. Right. Yeah, all these workers who were left on the job at this point because, you know, of the layoffs and the shuffling around, they're all improperly trained, you know, they've been shuffled around to 20 jobs of the plant, they're underpaid. And again, the supervisor failed to mention what the procedure actually was. Can't really blame them. So, after the worker put water into the pipes, he noticed it was not coming out of the drain cocks, right? This is probably not a good sign. Not a good sign, yes.

So, he stopped the water. He found that the filters between where he was putting the water in and where the water was supposed to come out, they were full of rusty metal schmoo. Right? Not a skookum. No, no, it's full of schmoo. Like, if you ever, you ever taken a wire brush to a cast iron pan that was all rusty, put some water over it, that's what was in there, right? So, the supervisor, yeah, schmoo. So, the supervisor said, all right, clean the filters, turn the water back on, which he did, right? And now the water was draining from three of the four drain cocks, right? Which is better than before, but they're still not the same amount of water going out of the pipes as there was going into the pipes. Not ideal. Not ideal to be playing

the Windows 95 pipe screensaver with incredibly dangerous chemicals. Yes. This was around 9.30 p.m., right? It's on the second shift. No one knows exactly how the water made it into the MIC tank. There's a lot of muddying of the waters after this, which we'll talk about later. I keep mentioning this, but this is my favorite part. Any engineering disaster and how you know it's going to be really bad is when you're like, well, we can't say exactly how this happened, but scientifically we can reconstruct and you're just like, no. A lot of people have hypothesized that from where they were cleaning out the lines, it made it through the jumper line and then into the tank, right? There were several closed

valves between where the water was going in and the tank. But again, these are all carbon steel and had been used to transfer highly caressive chemicals. So they weren't... So something just has... Yeah. They could be closed-ish. Right. So stuff begins to happen at this point, right? Oh, I hate when stuff begins to happen. Yeah. Now, this is from, again, the same book I mentioned before, the Bhopal saga. There's several accounts of what happened. This is all put into one timeline. Some of the accounts are contradictory, so I tried to reconstruct this as best as I could. Round turn 30, 1030, there was a shift change, right? New operators log the pressure in MIC tank 610, which is this guy, right? At 2 psi, right?

And the worker who was cleaning the lines was told to keep the lines running, and the night shift would turn it off, right? Because they don't notice anything wrong at this point. Now... It's blocked off by a bunch of closed valves, right? It's fine. They're fine. Yeah, exactly. Now, at 11 o'clock, some workers note the pressure of tank 610 as 10 psi. Supposed to be running at, like, at 2, right? Supposed to be... Well, it can't hold pressure, it shouldn't even be at 2. Oh, it's running at negative 2. It should be 0. So, you know, there's a... Again, there's several conflicting reports at this point. Other workers... Other reports said it was 2 psi at this point, right? And some field operators reported that

MIC was leaking near the shutdown scrubber, right? The scrubber we mentioned before, which, again, stuff leaked constantly from this plant, so no one was too worried. Round 1130 p.m., field operators noted more leaks from the MIC unit, right? Which is upstream from the tank, including, of course, dirty brown water full of schmoo. Because it's just taken all of those, all of the, like, schmoo off of the valves. Off of the valves, off of the pipes, so on and so forth. Everything, yeah. Again, these leaks were considered normal. No big deal. That's so fucking scary. So, at midnight, operators found leaks even higher up on the structure, right? On the supervisor on duty, recommended turning the water off, but we're

going to leave it until after tea time. Oh, finally we found something that we can claim like a British legacy for, and it's... Fuck it, we'll do it after I've had a KitKat and, like, some breakfast tea. Great, yeah, thanks. Okay, so it's Justin here in post-production. This episode went very long and went three hours, in fact. So what I've decided to do is split it up into two parts. This is the end of part one. Part two is going to be about the same length. It'll be out in, I think, a week, maybe two weeks. We might try and, we might try and jam the Tacoma Narrows Bridge episode in there, in between. I don't know yet. We'll figure that out. But anyway, this is the end of part one. See you all later in

part two. All right, bye.