Bhopal just can’t catch a break!
At the mention of India’s Bhopal region, most people over a certain age will think of that gas disaster. On December 3rd, 1984, over 500K people in that location lost their lives due to a gas leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant.
The gas was Methyl Isocyanate (MIC).
I remember that. I was ten, going on eleven. Those were some pretty horrific images that were getting shown on the news.
That many were injured. Wikipedia said 2,259 immediate deaths with a few thousand more in the following weeks.
FWIW, Amnesty International says 22,000 were killed and 500K suffered injuries.
There was a vicious labor dispute in progress at the time of the incident. Strikers sabotaged the plant.
See also https://www.bhopal.com/bhopal-tragedy-cause.html
Investigators believe the saboteurs died in the cascading failures caused by their actions.
Some two and a half years after the tragedy, UCC filed a lengthy court document in India detailing the findings of its scientific and legal investigations: the cause of the disaster was sabotage.
UCC’s investigation proved with virtual certainty that the disaster was caused by the direct entry of water into Tank 610 through a hose connected to the tank.
All of this was supported by hard evidence set forth in the presentation made by Ashok S. Kalelkar of Arthur D. Little, Inc. at The Institution of Chemical Engineers Conference on Preventing Major Chemical Accidents in London, U.K., in 1988.
Early accounts of the disaster that focused on the GOI’s theory that water-washing caused the accident subsequently were disproved.
That many were injured.
Only 16,000 were believed to eventually have died from it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster