Bhopal disaster — The night of 2–3 December · 25
On the night of 2–3 December 1984, methyl isocyanate (MIC) escaped from Tank 610 at the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. The official immediate death toll recorded in early government figures was 2,259. Later Indian government statements used about 3,500 deaths within days and more than 15,000 gas-related deaths over subsequent years; campaign groups have published still higher totals. This page dates those figures and does not describe injuries. 25 The Supreme Court holds that Indian accused may be tried for death by negligence, not culpable homicide. Keep Bhopal disaster with “The night of 2–3 December” and 2 from 1984. The successor company inherits the argument over whether any parent duty remains.
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.
In 1984, Bhopal disaster keeps 2 and “The night of 2–3 December.” Change the verb when the status changes. Keep Bhopal disaster with “The night of 2–3 December” and 2 from 1984. 21984
Figures to keep
- Year in the file
- 1984
- Figure that fixes it
- 2
- Case
- Bhopal disaster
- Line that was public
- The night of 2–3 December
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