Bhopal disaster (1984): A tank in a crowded city · 247

A leak, a settlement and a thin conviction Bhopal is the public-record industrial disaster that industrial-accident law still cites when parent companies, host states and neighbours do not share a courtroom. UCIL, majority-owned by Union Carbide Corporation, made carbamate pesticides at Bhopal. The MIC unit dated from the late 1970s. By 1984 the plant sat beside densely inhabited wards. Safety systems on Tank 610 — refrigeration, scrubbing, flaring — were not in the state the design assumed, according to later Indian investigation and civil discovery.

Water entering the MIC tank is the physical trigger most official reconstructions accept. How the water got there, and how far that question matters beside disabled safeguards, remains a secondary argument. This page does not reconstruct a method. The public fact is an uncontrolled release over sleeping neighbourhoods.

Hospitals and municipal cremation grounds were overwhelmed on 3 December. The first official immediate count, 2,259, is still the figure many legal summaries use for the night itself. A 2006 government affidavit and later health-department statements raised injury counts above 500,000 and later death attributions into five figures.