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It was after midnight on Dec. 3, 1984, when at least 40 metric tons of deadly methyl isocyanate began spewing from a runaway reaction in a tank at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. People woke to screams, gasps, burning lungs, burning eyes, not knowing what was happening to them.
The company had not told them of the chemical hazards at the plant. Had not told the slum-dwellers squatting near the fenceline that they were in harm's way. Had not told city residents of how the gas clung to terrain instead of dissipating. No warning siren woke them, although the leak had been going on for hours. As thousands of injured streamed into local hospitals, doctors had no idea what was causing the problem or how to treat it. The dead piled up so fast they had to be buried quickly, but probably at least 2,500 died within the first few days. Eventual fatalities have been estimated at 15,000 or more. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were left with blindness, breathing problems, and other injuries.
Those people were killed by lack of information - as much as by any other cause.
Power through knowledge
As Congress considered during 1985-86 how to keep a Bhopal from happening in the United States, it became clear that direct federal regulation of chemical plant safety was politically impossible amid the anti-regulatory zeal of the Reagan administration. What evolved was a 1986 compromise known as EPCRA, the first of a series of measures legally establishing a public right to know about chemical hazards.
The idea of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act was that informed public pressure might force companies to make plants safer voluntarily, even if government couldn't or wouldn't. By most accounts, the theory worked. Many of the bigger companies made great safety improvements over the next decade or more, although much more was left to do.
But within a few years, it also became clear that chemical and related industries were lobbying hard to obstruct, limit and delay the public right to know of chemical hazards. Although Congress attached a second right-to-know law to the 1990 Clean Air Act, it took much of the decade for EPA to put it into effect, and by August 1999, an industry-dominated Congress had begun repealing parts of it.
Over the past six years - roughly since the 1998 West African embassy bombings - there has been a broad rollback in the public's right to know about a wide range of environmental hazards and "critical infrastructure." Even the Toxic Release Inventory, a keystone of the 1986 right-to-know law and a basic tool for environmental reporters over the years, is being whittled down by the EPA under pressure from Western mining interests. [TRI data can be ordered through IRE at www.ire.org/ databaselibrary/databases/toxic.]
Congress' nonpartisan watchdog arm, the General Accountability Office, reported in 2003 that there are 123 chemical facilities in American cities where a worst-case accident could expose more than a million people to toxic gases. Yet a 1999 law essentially prohibited the EPA from giving this information to the American public. Proponents said it would provide a "roadmap for terrorists."
Twenty years after Bhopal, federal officials have yet to impose safety requirements on chemical plants. Today, three years after 9/11, the feds have yet to require chemical plants to fence off dangerous tanks, lock their gates, screen their employees, or take even the most basic security measures. Why? Industry has lobbied against it.
Hiding the dangers
While government and industry say they want to protect the public against terrorism, they have flunked the sincerity test. They have left the public unprotected while they have protected themselves. These environmental hazards (and they are not just chemical plants) amount to pre-positioned weapons of mass destruction in U.S. cities and counties. So far, the bulk of officials' response has been to prevent the public from knowing about it. On this front, the U.S. public is little safer today than on 9/11.
Right now, the Department of Homeland Security is considering whether to take the diamond shaped hazard placards off of railroad tank cars containing chlorine and other deadly gases - but tightening basic security and safety rules. Such cars sit at railroad sidings across the United States - unguarded. Since chlorine is a disinfectant, the tankers are commonly found at municipal drinking water and sewage treatment utilities. It was also one of the earliest chemical weapons used in World War I.
In November 1999, a front-page series in The Washington Post exposed a pattern of lax safety in chlorine handling at the Blue Plains sewage treatment plant a few miles south of the U.S. Capitol. A leak or spill from Blue Plains could have endangered not merely the hundreds of thousands of citizens within that radius, but also members of Congress.
By March 2000, it emerged that Washington authorities knew about the safety problems but had been denying and hiding them - and had now come up with a complete plan for switching to a safer disinfectant. Within two months after September 11, 2001, the timetable for carrying out that plan had been accelerated and the switch was complete. Since then, a major fraction of the industry nationwide has begun to switch.
Are there chlorine tankers in your community? The public's (and news media's) right to know the answer is shrinking daily.
Joseph A. Davis is director of the Society of Environmental Journalists' Watchdog Project. He has written about the environment, energy, and natural resources for 28 years.
