The Unethical Gas Carphady : The Bhopal Gas Tragedy

Proper training and protocols may have solved or prevented the problem. With more problems to add to the list of chain reactions from the accident, the government had to change industry safety which in turn, increased industry safety. New study groups were used to research the incident. New organizations had to be created to conduct proper training implementing the safety measures for the power plant operators. Many new publications had to be brought into existence to have better oversight of nuclear power plant operations. A

The decision makers in the “Something’s Rotten in Hondo” are George the Plant Manager and Bill George’s boss. The Stakeholders are George, George’s family, the town of Hondo, Environmental Protection Agency, all who are affected by the plants pollution, the Mexican town, and the environment. George had moved from El Paso, Texas to Hondo, Texas with his family four years ago to assume the roll of the manager at Ardnak Plastic Inc. This plant manufactures plastic parts for small equipment and has several hundred workers from the town of Hondo. For the past few months George has been getting calls from his boss Bill because the emissions from the plants smokestacks were constantly above Environmental Protection

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory took place on March 25th, 1911 which led to 145 deaths. These deaths could have been prevented if the owner’s, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris would have kept up on proper maintenance within the building. There were several reasons why they should have been found guilty for manslaughter, but the courts found them to be not guilty. The reasons are as follows; doors were locked from the outside, water pressure in the hoses wasn’t sufficient and the hose nozzle was rusted shut, no sprinkler system found anywhere in the building, and only 3 of the 4 elevators were in good working order.

In the beginning of this essay I would like to present some facts and figures related to our topic. On December 3, 1984, at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India there was a deadly leak of methyl isocyanate. It caused thousands of people to die and affected generations to come. The leak happened due to a series of human and mechanical failures. The local health officials were neither knowledgeable about the deadly chemical that was being stored there nor were they equipped to handle the tragedy. Another incident happened at the Union Carbide plant in West Virginia. A toxic cloud of the same chemical was leaked into the atmosphere and it was a shocking reminder that such accidents could happen in the both developed and developing countries. The statistics prove that chemical spills occur on a regular basis in different parts of the world. In 1976 there were

John Bartlow Martin in his case study exams the Centralia No.5 coal mine disaster on March 25,1947. This explosion occurred near the town of Centralia, Illinois, killing 111 mine workers. The detonation of the mine was caused of heavy deposits coal -dust along the roadway and entrances which over time exploded. Tunnel fires killed most miners, other were trapped and died with accumulating of poison gas. The explosion of Centralia No.5 can be blamed cause of lack of mine safely which this tragedy could have been prevented if the basic standards were followed.

Over 500,000 people were exposed to toxic gas from a pesticide plant, leading to thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of injuries.

Many participants mentioned that they saw the lack of news about potential health and safety hazards linked with their recovery and cleanup duties. A landfill worker commented on inconsistent information: "there were a lot of passenger cars that were brought out of the World Trade Center and brought over to the landfill." The worker also went saying that everybody thought there wasn't anything wrong with this action. The workers were just rinsing them off and gave the cars back to the owners. It remained not noticed as a potential hazard at the time. However, local workers soon realized that there could be potential contaminants on the vehicles, which were free to roam after owner claimed his/her vehicle (Ekenga pg. six yr. 2011). This dilemma brought great attention towards the toxicity not only towards the victims, but the recovery workers as well. Thus, The World Trade Center Health Registry was installed to follow the long-term health consequences of persons exposed to the attack. The registry incorporated a group of 71,437 individuals enrolled and completed a health survey between the dates of September 2003 and November 2004. This included 30,665 cleanup workers and volunteers, of whom 4,490 reported working at the landfill. (Ekenga pg. two yr.

This case study analyzes the experiences of Courtland Kelley at General Motors (GM). Courtland Kelley a third generation GM worker put his job on the line by pushing the GM managers and executives to fully respond to the safety issues found while working as a safety inspector at the company. Kelley along with his supervisor Bill McAleer first discovered the issues while auditing GM cars at rail yards across the country, a spot check of vehicles before the cars were cleared to be delivered to the dealers. McAleer was taken off the audit as a result, who subsequently sued the company seeking whistle-blower protection. The case was eventually dismissed by a judge in favor of GM. The judgement only increased Kelley’s

On December 2, 1984, water inadvertently entered a storage tank containing more than 80,000 pounds of methyl isocyanate, or MIC, which reacts violently with water. A subsequent runaway reaction generated heat and pressure causing a relief valve to open and resulted in a massive toxic gas release. A dense, lethal cloud of approximately 40 tons of MIC was released to the city exposing to thousands of people. An estimated 3,800 people died immediately, and tens of thousands of people were injured. As of 1994, more than 50,000 people remained partially or totally disabled as a result of exposure to MIC. This tragedy led to the establishment of laws and Process Safety Management system.

Prior to the disaster, the company had been facing a financial crisis for many years because the sale of pesticides had been fallen (Joseph, Kaszniak and Long 2005, p. 544). Due to the budget cuts, many plant operators received insufficient training on operations and safety awareness (Mannan 2012, p. 2649). As shown in Figure 1, there was a decrease in the length of training programmes for plant operators from 18 months in 1975 to only one month in December 1984 (Chouhan 2005, p. 207). Therefore, with a lack of the knowledge of runaway reactions occurring in the storage tank when the accident happened, many workers could not immediately take any emergency action to lessen the risk of the MIC escape from the storage tank (Chouhan 2005, p. 207). To connect the tank with another

The series of ethical issues that took place leading to the disaster are complex, and other factors such as economic and political issues arose after the catastrophe happened. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the ethical issues that took place before the disaster happened, and investigate the moral obligations, social responsibility and justice at an individual and organizational level. The ethical dilemma is broken down into three categories, which include the company’s management priority to reduce costs and time, neglecting safety issues addressed by staff, human misjudgment and errors in neglecting pressure reading; and finally, overlooking the technical design flaws that were not tested by BP before installing to use. The

A single slip in action may cause lasting sorrow. A slight mistake in operation at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal of India causes a lot of deaths and injuries. What a tragedy it is. Undoubtedly, there must be something wrong with the management of the plant.

Although the accident was caused by a mechanical failure, it spiralled out of control because of an insufficient safety system. BP acted inefficiently and their carelessness cost the lives of people and damaged the environment, nevertheless this does not mean they acted in an unethical way as

Nowadays it is common to hear on the news about recent health and environmental scares especially with the increasing research done about the causes and effects of global warming. However, life just a century ago was very different. During the early twentieth century, people trusted industries. Therefore, they did not fight for government regulation of industries or the need for it to inform them about possible harmful practices done by industries. It took the deaths and emergence of illnesses of many workers and citizens for the public to start worrying. Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner discussed this time period with a focus on the lead and chemical industries in their book Deceit and Denial: the Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution.

This essay discusses the apparently logical proposition that if risk can be identified and controlled, industrial disasters are preventable. It first examines the concepts of ‘risk’, ‘identification and control’, ‘disaster’ and ‘preventable’ before examining the nature of the industrial disaster through a systems approach; it will be shown that a disaster can be deconstructed in order to present a series of ‘hooks’ on which preventative action could be taken. However, the nature of the system and organizational culture in which it operates prohibits those lessons from being applied. Furthermore, not only are there limits to lessons,