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Bhopal Gas Case Study

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On the night December 3rd, one of the worst industrial accidents in history occurred in Bhopal, India. A gas leak spread throughout the streets of Bhopal and devastated all of the inhabitants in the area; at least 3800 of the residents were immediately killed. The gas that leaked was known as methyl isocyanate (MIC). An estimate of forty tons of the gas was leaked. The death toll quickly rose to the tens of thousands in the following days. The total count of people affected is close to half million people. Many questions arose from this incident, such as how and why it happened and how it could avoided. The Indian government had hopes in industrializing the nation. The Indian government implemented policies that would attract foreign companies to invest in local industry. One of the companies that invested was a large chemical producing company called the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC). The company built a plant that produced a commonly used pesticide, Sevin, in Bhopal. The …show more content…
The morning of December 3rd, the people who were affected began to feel the symptoms of being exposed to MIC, which includes coughing, itchy eyes and skin, breathing issues, internal hemorrhaging, and pneumonia. Thousands of people, confused with what was going on with their bodies, began running to hospitals to look for a diagnosis. Unfortunately, the doctors were just as confused as the patients; inhaling MIC is not a common occurrence. Symptoms of MIC exposure were not immediately known to the physicians. With only a few hospitals around, there was not much space or man power to accommodate to all that were in need of help. It was reported that 50,000 patients were in the first two days following the leakage. The villages and slums in the neighboring areas of the factory were the worst affected because transportation was not accessible to

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