=======================Electronic Edition========================
. .
. RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #170 .
. ---February 28, 1990--- .
. HEADLINES: .
. FROM BHOPAL WITH LOVE .
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FROM BHOPAL WITH LOVE
Officials of the Union Carbide Corporation have accused the
Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (CCHW) of being tied
to the "communist party." As most of our readers know, CCHW is a
key leadership organization in the grass-roots citizens' movement
against toxic chemicals. Union Carbide is the owner of 700
chemical plants worldwide, including the plant at Bhopal, India,
where a toxic gas leak killed an estimated 8,000 people, and
injured an estimated 300,000 others[1] the night of Dec. 2, 1984,
in the world's largest industrial disaster.
The Carbide attack on CCHW is contained in an internal corporate
memo dated November 14, 1989, signed by Clyde Greenert. Mr.
Greenert is Director for Corporate Contributions, Public Issues
and Administration at Carbide's headquarters in Danbury,
Connecticut.
Contacted at Carbide headquarters, Robert M. Berzok, Director of
Corporate Communications, confirmed that the memo was written by
Mr. Greenert but said Mr. Greenert is "on vacation" and not
available for comment. After confirming the authenticity of the
memo, Mr. Berzok refused to comment on any aspect it. Mr. Berzok
himself is listed on the memo as a recipient. We asked him at
least 30 questions relating to the memo but he consistently said
"no comment." From our one-way conversation with Mr. Berzok, we
drew the strong impression that a high-level decision had been
made within Carbide to circle the wagons and try to stonewall.
Mr. Berzok assured us several times that none of the other
recipients of the memo would comment upon it either, but he
refused to give us phone numbers for any them so we could not
test how tight corporate security on this matter has become. Mr.
Berzok refused to say which of the world's many communist parties
Carbide officials want to believe CCHW is tied to.
The memo, which was sent to 13 individuals within Carbide's top
management, says, "CCHW is one of the most radical coalitions
operating under the environmentalist banner. They have ties into
labor, the communist party and all manner of folk with
private/single agenda [sic]."
The memo goes on: "In October, at their grass roots convention,
they developed the attached agenda which if accomplished, in
total, would restructure U.S. society into something
unrecognizable and probably unworkable. It's a tour de force of
public policy issues to be affecting business in year [sic] to
come." Mr. Berzok would not confirm which "agenda" Mr. Greenert's
memo was referring to, but we believe it was CCHW's regular
publication, ACTION BULLETIN No. 24 (November, 1989), which
contains the list of "resolutions" passed by citizens who
attended the national convention in Washington, DC Oct. 6-7,
1989. Mr. Berzok refused to say whether Carbide had had
representatives at the grass-roots convention. He also refused to
say why he refused to say.
Since Carbide officials seem afraid to speak to us about this
matter, we are forced to speculate about their motives. What sort
of company is Union Carbide?
Going back to the 1930s, Carbide has a long history of worker
health and safety problems and management has been unable to
project an image of caring. From 1930 to 1932, 476 Carbide
workers died on a tunneling project in Gauley Bridge, West
Virginia; a Carbide subsidiary "had hired the men to drill a
tunnel that would divert water to a hydroelectric plant, but the
deadly silicon dust in the tunnel became so thick that within
nine months the miners, mostly black, began dying off and were
quietly buried in mass graves while the work went on. After each
blast, company foremen would force the men back into the tunnel,
often at gunpoint, without even waiting for the dust to settle.
Respirators? They weren't necessary. As one company official
reportedly said, 'I wouldn't give $2.50 for all the niggers on
the job.'" In Indonesia during the 1970s, over 400 employees at
Carbide's Cimanngis battery plant contracted kidney diseases
after drinking the plant's mercury-contaminated well water, which
they were never told was poisonous. In Tennessee for forty years
(until 1983), Carbide "discharged toxic and radioactive chemicals
into air, water and unlined pits in the ground, poisoned many
workers with mercury, and contaminated birds, fish and even bees
with radioactivity by plowing wastes into the hillsides" of Oak
Ridge.[2]
Carbide is a chemical giant whose best-known products are plastic
garbage bags ("Glad" bags), Eveready batteries, and Prestone
antifreeze. They also make and sell pesticides on a massive scale
($335 million in 1983), especially in the third world. The Bhopal
plant made pesticides using methyl isocyanate (MIC).
Chemical pesticides are now among Carbide's most successful
products because the market for pesticides in the third world is
expanding rapidly; laws are lax and regulatory officials often
don't ask hard questions, or don't ask any questions. Worldwide,
pesticide sales increased from $2.7 billion in 1970 to $11.6
billion in 1980 and they're expected to hit $18.5 billion this
year.[3]
After a pesticide is banned in the U.S. it can still be exported
to the third world legally. Union Carbide sells many pesticides
in the third world that our government has banned as too
dangerous to humans or the environment. For example, Carbide
sells DDT, Mirex, Heptachlor, Chlordane, and Endrin in the third
world,[4] all of which are banned in the U.S.
The World Health Organization estimates that one million humans
are poisoned by pesticides each year, 99% of them in the third
world. These "incidents" kill as many as 20,000 humans each year,
again the vast majority of deaths occurring in the third
world.[5] (These are immediate poisoning deaths, not cancers or
other diseases that may strike later.)
As regulations threaten to restrict export of banned pesticides
to the third world, large chemical companies have developed a
clever strategy: they simply ship the separate chemical
ingredients of a banned pesticide to a third world country, then
manufacture it there in "formulation plants." From the third
world country, the banned pesticide can be shipped anywhere.
Bhopal started as a formulation plant.
"It's a real Mafia-type operation," says Dr. Harold Hubbard of
the United Nations Pan American Health Organization, not
referring to Union Carbide specifically. "Global companies are
setting up formulation plants all over the world. [They] simply
go into less developed countries, give a banned pesticide a local
name, and then turn around and sell it all over the world under
that new name."[6]
Until 1978, Carbide made pesticides at Bhopal without using the
supremely toxic chemical, MIC. But MIC was more profitable, so
they switched. In 1979 and again in 1982, Carbide sent teams of
experts from Danbury to evaluate safety hazards at the Bhopal
plant. The experts specifically warned of plant design
deficiencies and the dangers of a "runaway reaction" inside an
MIC tank--precisely the reaction that occurred in 1984. Corporate
headquarters never followed up to see that the recommendations
were implemented.
After the disaster at Bhopal, Carbide offered the community $100
million in damages, or roughly $350 per victim. The Indian
government is asking $3.12 billion, or 30 times what Carbide
initially offered. In April, 1985, Carbide shut the Bhopal plant,
giving its workers $833 severance pay, which is "several times
less than other American companies like Coca Cola and IBM paid
their employees when they had been forced to close."[7] Since
that awful night in 1984, Carbide has sold off more than 15 of
its subsidiaries and it is now a much smaller company than it was
in 1984. Most of the money has been distributed to stockholders,
so it will not be available to pay victims when the Indian courts
decide Carbide's liability for Bhopal. Some observers believe
Carbide is selling its assets getting ready to declare Chapter 11
bankruptcy rather than compensate its victims, just as
Johns-Manville did with its asbestos victims.[8]
We hope these facts will help our readers put into perspective
such silly attacks on CCHW by the world's largest and most
ruthless poisoner. And we urge our readers to phone a protest to
the top PR man at Carbide, Mr. Ron Wishert [(203) 794-4103] or
send him a tart note at 39 Old Ridgebury Rd., Danbury, CT
06817-0001. We also urge readers to send contributions of $50 or
more to CCHW to help them purchase a new building for their
offices as they lead the grass-roots toxics movement on to new
victories: CCHW, P.O. Box 926, Arlington, VA 22216.
--Peter Montague
===============
[1] The basis for the estimate of 8,000 deaths and 300,000
injuries, 70,000 of them permanent injuries, is meticulously
documented by the prize-winning journalist, Dan Kurzman, in his
book A KILLING WIND: INSIDE UNION CARBIDE AND THE BHOPAL
CATASTROPHE (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), pgs. 130-133.
[2] All information in this paragraph is from Kurzman, cited
above in note 1, pg. 92.
[3] World Resources Institute, WORLD RESOURCES 1988-1989 (New
York: Basic Books, 1990), pg. 28.
[4] David Weir and Mark Schapiro, CIRCLE OF POISON: PESTICIDES
AND PEOPLE IN A HUNGRY WORLD (San Francisco, CA: Institute for
Food and Development Policy [1885 Mission St., San Francisco, CA
94103; phone (415) 864-8555], 1981), pg. 80.
[5] World Resources Institute, cited above in note 3, pg. 29.
[6] Dr. Hubbard is quoted in Weir and Schapiro, cited above in
note 4, pgs. 41-42.
[7] Kurzman, cited above in note 1, pg. 225.
[8] David Weir, THE BHOPAL SYNDROME: PESTICIDES, ENVIRONMENT, AND
HEALTH (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987), Appendix E, pgs.
197-199 lists the assets Carbide sold off during 1985 and 1986.
Descriptor terms: cchw; union carbide; bhopal; occupational
safety and health; race; african-americans; gauley bridge, wv;
va; indonesia; cimanngis; drinking water; kidney disease; mercury;
heavy metals; pesticides; studies; who;
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--Peter Montague, Editor
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