Care to substantiate the claim that somebody left a valve opened???It’s commonly known that Union Carbide’s plant in India was based on a design which was considered obsolete & unsafe in the US.
This comment is obscene and disgusting. I understand that people try to put their own nation first. Most of us do. Nevertheless the absence of security arrangements in the Bophal Union Carbide installation was simply criminal. The managers of Union Carbide accepted the possibility that thousands of people die just to save a few fu*king dollars. I do not know what happened to them, but if a Indian manager would have done the same in the US you guys simply would have executed him. Therefore it is fair that Union Carbide is paying for the damage it left behind. If you are thinking that a Indian life is less worth than a life in the US you are wrong.
Speculating what SatinDoll was getting at, I believe the "left a valve open" was shorthand for the idea that it was human error. Slip-blind water isolation plates that could have prevented the problem were not not used--evidently weren't on the checklist. This isn't a design problem, but an operational problem. Likewise, the inoperative alarms and other equipment.
The other point that has been made is that the plant's original design had been changed by the Indian engineers to make use of what was available indiginously and more cheaply (e.g., hydraulic, rather than electronic, instrumentation).
It does seem that there was blame to go around, including a large part to the Indian side of things.