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Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Germany Plans to Dispose of Bhopal Toxic Waste

By Simone Kaiser in Bhopal, India

 Bhopal's Toxic Legacy
06/26/2012



The Bhopal disaster in 1984 was one of the worst industrial accidents in...


A sign in the former control room reads: "Safety is everybody's business."

On the night of December 2, 1984, one of the biggest chemical accidents in history occurred in the Indian city of Bhopal. A factory owned by the US chemical company Union Carbide, now part of Dow Chemical, produced an insecticide called Sevin at the Bhopal plant. The facility was intended to bring work and prosperity to the capital of Madhya Pradesh, a largely rural state in the heart of India, a little bigger than Italy. Instead, the plant brought death to the residents of Bhopal. Several dozen tons of methyl isocyanate, a highly toxic chemical, leaked from a tank that night, releasing a deadly cloud of gas over the city. The leak is believed to have caused up to 30,000 deaths, although the exact number, especially in the slums adjacent to the plant, was never determined

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spiegel.de

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