Three Causes Of The 1984 Bhopal Chemical Plant Disaster In India

Other contributing factors included an inadequate pre-startup safety review, inadequate operator training on the newly installed control system, unevaluated temporary changes, malfunctioning or missing equipment, misaligned valves, and bypassed critical safety devices; and insufficient technical expertise available in the control room during the

The accidents happened almost daily and there wasn’t anything that could be done to prevent the accidents from happening except modifying the machines a little more. Factories very much lacked safety.

Many changes have occurred since the 1992 convention in Minamata, Japan. The world has recognized a need for an anticipatory approach to manage industrial disasters. In the US the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has tried to improve and anticipate the industrial safety of chemical facilities. In response to the Bhopal, India tragedy the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (CAAA) section 112(r) requires the EPA to publish the Risk Management Plan (RMP) regulations. Part of the CAAA mandated that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) create the Process Safety Management of Highly Hazardous Chemicals 29 CFR 1910.119 standard. These regulations require hazard assessments, chemical release prevention programs, and emergency response preparedness (Environmental Protection Agency, 2009).

The operator opened the relief valve to release the pressure in which is in the reactor, while the pressure inside the reactor was decreasing up to the required level due to the improper respond and malfunctioning lead to failure of the valve to close. Not only wrong readings by the engineers, but also an inputting excess amount of computer data lead to the technical failure, the slag in the ongoing analyzing process and immediately human alert was alarmed in the power plant. But this issue as not stopped yet, the core of the reactor was beginning to cook. The incident China syndrome was named since there was the increasing of temperature from 4300 degrees Celsius to 5300degree at which meltdown. Hazardous radioactive gas was exposed all over the plant because of the leaked water from the open valve in an adjacent building. No emergency precaution was taken when the second accident of radioactive gas took place. In the video, there was also a communication error to note down and transfer the report were the problems facing the operators to take the decision quickly. Also, one of the employers found the fault in the explosion theory of co-worker prediction the hydrogen bubble was never a threat, it was a human error. Finally, it was the most devastating incident that was spread in the news all over the world and local people

There are so many issues facing the world today that it is sometimes hard to understand why they occur and what they affect. Today it is apparent that many people take the environment of the earth for granted. Pollution, energy, and natural resources are all seen as an environmental element that can threaten our future and destroy the environment. But there is another threat to the environment that is certainly overlooked by today's society and was overlooked by many in the past. This element is the act of war. There are many different aspects of war that can affect the environment and the people of our world, but there is one specific facet of war that could be considered most detrimental… chemical warfare. "Chemical warfare is

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.

Management was not allowing adequate time for maintenance work. It was reported that two months before the explosion a maintenance worker could not complete repair work on mining equipment because it was needed for work underground. Because management allowed broken equipment to be involved in dangerous mining operations this would be a human hazard. Maintenance workers were also required to modify machinery in order to conform to safety regulations. This is a human hazard because workers are required to work with machinery that could possibly be dangerous and employees maybe using the machinery improperly.

Two days later on November 12th, after all the up-keep was taken care of on the reactor, they tried to start it up again. They were unsuccessful in starting up the reactor, and further investigation revealed a slurry blocking any passage through the pipelines which lead to the reactor. However, slurries were a very common thing during shutdowns. They form when methyl mercaptan reacts with other stagnate chemicals in the pipeline, forming a blockage. To clear this slurry, operators began pumping hot water through the piping to try and break it up. By noon on November 13th, operators deemed they had cleared the slurry. During the hot water pumping, a valve was accidentally left opened, which allowed roughly 2,000 pounds of water to flow into the methyl mercaptan feedline and storage tank. This

A presidential committee was designated to review the accident. After various months the investigators wrote a report, showing an O-Ring seal rupture as the main reason of the explosion. Due to the freezing climate, the ring didn’t expand to hold the seal firm, letting hot vapors to escape.

Author, Ken Stickney, blames the BP Deepwater explosion for change in safety regulations over the past five years. Stickney describes how people and businesses make mistakes, but it is important to learn from those mistakes. Some advancements over the past few years include clearer guidelines, increased training, “and empowerment for workers who are better able to recognize when things go wrong” (Stickney 14A). Several researchers have discussed that a major role in the cause of the explosion was that the men were not knowledgeable on safety precautions and being able to distinguish when things go wrong. Workers have since been more educated before going to work on the oil rigs

It all started with a malfunction in the secondary, non-nuclear section of the plant. There was a failure that prevented the pumps from sending water down to the core to cool the hot, blazing core. This caused many things in the plant to shut down, so to try and reduce the pressure the operator opened a relief valve. This value should have closed when the pressure was relieved, but instead it got stuck. However, in the control room it showed that it was closed, so they had no idea that a disaster was brewing on the horizon.

The disaster took place on April 1986, and was caused by inexperienced staff. When the power plant had to undergo a special test, to make sure that sufficient amount of cooling water would be supplied to the reactor in case of a power outage. However, the test had been delayed, because the national grid required the power output more than the expected time. Hence, the test was postponed after midnight where the night shift had to come. The night shift had little experience about such a test as most of them were electrical engineers rather than nuclear. On the other hand, the night shift had to perform the test before the grid needed the power again, otherwise they would have all been fined or fired. Consequently, lead to an unnecessary pressure on the personnel, which in turn increased the probability of making incorrect

Broughton, Edward, “The Bhopal disaster and its aftermath: a review”, Edward Broughton, Environ Health. 2005; Published online 2005 May, 10http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1142333/

The causes of the accident was quite complex. In brief, it began with a closed bypass valve, which stopped the water flowing to the secondary main feed water pumps, once the steam generators could not receive water, they stopped and the reactor emergently shutdown. Control rods were inserted into the

The second section of the book focused on the chemical industry, specifically vinyl chloride, where it was explained there was little known about the effects of chemicals. Because of this, there was the question of whether “a product was to be considered safe until proven dangerous” or vice versa where a product was considered dangerous until proven safe. This time the public showed greater opposition to the use of vinyl chloride, as environmentalists and labor unions united to reveal the harmful effects of it. Similar to the lead industry, the chemical industry also fought back reasoning to the government that only high levels of chemical exposure was harmful to people and the government