The Bhopal Disaster of 1984 is widely regarded as the worst industrial disaster in human history.
The disaster involved a massive chemical leak from a methyl isocyanate processing plant, and a toxic cloud of dangerous chemicals that flowed through the densely populated areas around the plant, killing over four thousand people and crippling hundreds of thousands with life-long symptoms.
The technical details of the catastrophe are fairly straightforward.
On an early December night, water was leaked into a tank containing methyl isocyanate (MIC), which resulted in a reaction that pressurized the tank to the point of venting the gases out into the atmosphere.
Since most of the gases involved were heavier than air, the resulting death cloud fell promptly to the ground, at which point winds blew the toxins into and through the city of Bhopal like a gaseous tidal wave, maiming all directly exposed and contaminating the surrounding environment for decades to come.
Just as the last victim of Hiroshima is yet to be born, the same can be said of the Bhopal Disaster.
The root cause of failure has been somewhat controversial and obfuscated due to corporate interference.
The company that owned the plant, Union Carbide Corporation, took advantage of the corruption in the Indian government, the highly deregulated industry laws of the nation, and the lack of education and voice amongst the local population, to minimize the safety costs and maintenance procedures, so as to maximize profit from the plant.
Numerous safety procedures were simply ignored, tanks were filled to far above their theoretical capacity, and workers were given minimal-and sometimes even non-existent-training, and had to consult manuals written in English, despite being illiterate.
Even the workers knew that they were toeing the line before disaster-and for attempting to refuse to deviate from the proper safety regulations when ordered to by the administration, around 70 percent of the workers were fined.
The maintenance situation was even more dismal than the worker status.
Apart from the horribly maintained water pipes that caused the leak in the first place, all sorts of fail-safes-ranging from alarms, pressure pipes, boiler-vents to clean tubes, flame towers, and water pressurizers-were all literally broken or non-existent.
Safety systems such as flame towers and water cannons, designed to dilute any escaping toxins to safe levels, were shut down to preserve money; although the fact that the alarm systems had been offline for years meant that no warning would even have been issued for the post-disaster mechanisms to kick in.
In short, the Bhopal Disaster was the result of a disgusting desire to maximize profit overseas at the expense of the local population.
Had even a few safety mechanisms remained online, despite the "exuberant" cost, the casualties might have been reduced by as much as 60 or 70 percent.
But once the natural process of neo-liberalism removes the human element from the profit equation, such a disaster might as well become a foregone conclusion.
A sad time we live in, if the lethal suffering of nearly a million people becomes an acceptable risk factor for industrial and engineering designs.