Five Past Midnight in Bhopal by Dominique Lapierre, Javier Moro. Scribner, £17.99, pp 352. ISBN 0 743 22034 X. Rating: ★★★★
This account of one of the worst public health disasters of the past 20 years makes for uncomfortable, even scary, reading, but it is simultaneously unputdownable. Journalist Dominique Lapierre and scriptwriter Javier Moro spent three years in Bhopal in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh in the late 1990s, where in 1984 a cloud of toxic gas had escaped from a pesticide plant owned by US firm Union Carbide, killing and injuring thousands. In an investigative tour de force, Lapierre and Moro interviewed witnesses and participants from India and the United States and spliced together the causes and aftereffects of the catastrophic poison cloud. The result reads like a thriller, albeit one whose terrifying outcome is known from the outset. Sometimes the story is incredible enough to seem entirely fictional—it seems impossible that negligence and greed could have such awful results, and that those who knew about the potential dangers did nothing to prevent them, although they could have done so without much effort or cost.
The book tracks the history of a group of villagers who had to leave their homes after prolonged droughts in search of a new life on the outskirts of the comparatively wealthy city of Bhopal. They settled among the poorest of the poor, in a district where the cloud killed tens of thousands of people, although the exact number cannot be determined because it was not known how many lived in this slum area. We become familiar with the characters and their adventures, just like protagonists in a novel. We also become familiar with India's relentless climate, nature, and “the planetary holocaust wrought by armies of ravaging insects,” which has destroyed people's livelihood in various parts of the world since biblical times.
The need for an effective weapon to fight these pests (so that locals could survive and make a living off their own soil, rather than by jumping on trains and scrounging whatever remnants of civilisation passengers left behind) was obvious. This is where Union Carbide came to the rescue. The company developed the “miracle” insecticide Sevin, a compound consisting of the deadly methyl isocyanate (MIC)—the poison that smells like boiled cabbage—and alpha naphthol. What follows is the story of how one of the assumed “saviours” of mankind wiped out between 15 000 and 30 000 people in one fell swoop; of how progress turned into its own worst nightmare. This is a tale of unwarranted optimism and daredevilry, of ignorance, carelessness, and financial savings in the wrong place, of a lack of regulation and control, continuity in company management, training, and accountability, and a lack of openness and transparency about chemical substances, ingredients, processes, and associated procedures. What America would never have tolerated on its own soil did not seem to be taken into any sort of consideration in a developing country, in spite of the exponentially larger numbers of people affected.
The book thunders along, never losing any of its momentum, and the point at which it all “goes up into their air” is tangible in its horror. This account is poignantly rich in human interest: there is the tradesman who hires out shamianas (tent-like canopies) to offer some form of protection against the poison cloud, which kept returning to the ground; there is the wedding ceremony of the girl Padmini in the slum area; and the station warden who tries to prevent the train from stopping. Lapierre and Moro bring all these tales of utter hopelessness vividly to life.
The final chapter, “What became of them,” gives short summaries for each of the main protagonists, starting with Warren Anderson, the chairman of Union Carbide at the time of the tragedy, and ending with Warren Woomer, who supervised the training of the “beautiful plant's” Indian engineers. Anderson left the company in 1986 and later disappeared. Woomer was the one whose warnings with respect to storing MIC rather than making it up as required remained unheeded.
Last week the Guardian reported that a court in Bhopal had refused to reduce the charge of culpable homicide against Warren Anderson, who has yet to be brought to justice. However, the Bhopal website (www.Bhopal.net) said that on 29 August, Anderson was found in New York and served with an arrest warrant by Greenpeace.
Figure.
PRAKASH HATVALNE/AP
A survivor of the Bhopal disaster sits beside a sign calling for the arrest of former Union Carbide chairman Warren Anderson