Are You Ready for an American Bhopal?
In 1984, a Union Carbide chemical plant accident in India killed as many as 8,000 people
As I write this in Atlanta, authorities in a neighboring county are issuing an ominous warning regarding a chemical plant accident at BioLab, a swimming pool chemical manufacturer:
Rockdale County has issued a new shelter in place order for Rockdale County. The Georgia Poison Center has created a hotline for calls relating to symptoms.
Local authorities and the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) are, for now, claiming that the chemicals pouring into the atmosphere don’t pose a specific danger, even though they pushed out an AMBER alert type of emergency message to my phone last night.
The gas involved is reportedly chlorine generated from a product the company manufactures called pool shock (the company is not yet releasing information that they aren’t obligated by law to release).
Pool shock is a chemical that reacts with water to generate enough chlorine into your swimming pool to make up for those lazy days when you forget to do standard maintenance by keeping your chlorine levels stable (hence, pool “shock”).
It’s nasty stuff. Reacting to water is exactly what happened at Biolab when a sprinkler system was (again, reportedly) accidentally triggered and sprayed water over dozens of pallets of the product.
When I owned a house in Austin with a pool, I used rubber gloves when I handled pool shock packages. You didn’t want to touch it or be anywhere near the puffy little clouds that popped out of the package when you opened it, and you definitely didn’t want this:
This video was shot this morning shortly after the county rescinded one shelter-in-place only to order another.
The final result of all this is, shall we say, up in the air.
Republicans, of course, want to further limit the reach of the federal agency that is supposed to protect us from these kinds of incidents. If they’re successful, conversations like this popping up on Facebook are bound to increase:
This is a snippet of conversation between the City of Conyers, the town most immediately affected by the blowup, and people who live near the plant, after the city prematurely declared that the shelter-in-place was rescinded. The reactions say a lot, considering they’re just emojis.
It is fair to say that the city doesn’t have the resources or technical personnel to correctly manage a crisis like this and that their incompetence is not their fault. It would be like me trying to tell you when it’s safe to go outside after a chemical plant disaster. I look outside and say, “Hey, the plume is going thatta way. Let’s play some softball!”
When you spend a decade relentlessly slicing and dicing the EPA like Republicans have done, mostly through the court system because they can’t legislate unpopular things like killing the EPA, this is what you get: Clueless local authorities who are completely out of their league while they randomly open and close local chemical plants that violate basic safety standards1.
Republicans want to, at best, delegate as many of the EPA’s responsibilities as they can to local authorities. In their wildest fantasies, they’d kill it altogether.
They want guys with my science background sniffing the air and making random decisions based on the smallest set of facts possible. Or which way the wind is blowing.
This brings me to Bhopal, India.
Bhopal was a devastating chemical accident launched by Union Carbide in Bhopal, India that killed 2500 people overnight, and, later, between eight and sixteen thousand in the wake of the accident’s aftereffects.2
The Union Carbide plant manufactured methyl isocyanate, which is used in pesticides. 574,366 people sustained verifiable injuries, including somewhere near 4,000 that led to permanent disabilities.
Chemical plants like that in India, in addition to supporting Republicans trying to gut the EPA, are how large chemical companies deal with the EPA: they simply move overseas to countries where there is little oversight3.
Republicans want the United States to be one of those countries. The sadistic 900-page Trump Manifesto, Project 2025, eagerly devotes an entire chapter to the EPA’s emasculation4.
The Biolab fiasco is not Bhopal. But keep in mind that chlorine gas is a common illicit weapon of war that was used by Syria’s Bashar al-Assad on his own people to curb the Syrian insurrection in 2014.
If large enough quantities get into the air, it kills people.
And with Republicans hell-bent on gutting the EPA, an American Bhopal is almost assuredly on the docket. We came close when a train derailed recently in East Palestine Ohio. In that accident, dozens of chemical freight cars flew off the tracks and released chemicals into the air that impacted more than 500,000 square miles in 16 states.5 6
The Biolab incident isn’t as serious, but the next one might be.
If Republicans are allowed to continue to eat away at the EPA, a program, I should mention, that was created by a Republican, Richard Nixon, an American Bhopal is an inevitability.
Some people commenting on the Facebook post seem to be saying this plant has been shut down before. This seems to be confirmed by this Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/01/georgia-biolab-chemicals-smoke-evacuation
I suspect that India’s oversight has improved since then but the point remains.
Pages 417 to 448
The initial accident was fairly reasonably contained. Norfolk Southern, the company responsible for the accident, initiated an unsanctioned burn-off of the chemicals despite warnings from one of its contractors.
