3 ideas
On the night of 2–3 December 1984, water entered Tank 610 at Union Carbide's pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. It set off a runaway reaction that vented roughly 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas over the sleeping slums pressed against the plant's walls. Thousands died within days and many thousands more in the years after, making it the deadliest industrial disaster on record.
The plant was losing money, and its safeguards were disabled or left degraded one by one. The MIC refrigeration unit was shut down, the vent gas scrubber was not ready, the flare tower was out of service, and the water curtain could not reach the gas. Each cut looked defensible alone, but together they removed every barrier, so a single mishap became a catastrophe.
The narrative starts with individual slum families and only later moves out to the plant and the corporation. This order shows that risk fell on the people who had the least information and the least power. Poor migrants had settled beside the factory for work and land, with little idea of what it made or how to react to a leak. Seen from the corporation inward, the same event looks like a technical failure; seen from the slums, it looks like risk handed to those least able to refuse it.