Well There's Your Problem | Episode 27: Bhopal Disaster (Part 2)
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- Опубліковано 11 вер 2024
- In this episode we talk about man-made mass death and destruction on a scale completely unprecedented in history. fun!
The Patreon: / wtyppod
image credits:
slide 1 chemical plant
By Julian Nyča - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikime...
king bhoja
By Bernard Gagnon - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikime...
taj ul masjid
By This file is not in the public domain. Therefore you are requested to use the following next to the image if you reuse this file: © Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikime...
bhopal city of lakes
By Deepak sankat - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikime...
train station
By Suyash Dwivedi - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikime...
insecticide pump
By Photographed by User:Bullenwächter - Hamburg Museum, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikime...
union carbide gas
By Union Carbide; scan and commentary by Don O'Brien - Country Gentleman magazine, 1922-10-07, via Flickr: Gas Lighting, CC BY 2.0, commons.wikime...
MIC tank
By Julian Nyča - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikime...
tea time
By joyosity - Tea at the Rittenhouse Hotel, CC BY 2.0, commons.wikime...
bhopal sunset
By Sankalpbhatt - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikime...
give us anderson
By Obi from ROMA ,LONDON - BHOPAL, CC BY 2.0, commons.wikime...
I look forward to the day when we all look at "We Have a Duty To Our Shareholders" with the same raw, justified disgust as "I was just following orders."
Give this man a medal.
Skeleton Wizard amen!
Maximizing shareholder value is a mere conspiracy of greed compared to debased and criminal military authority which is saying something.
jukebox_hero person oh yes i forgot
starving people is the natural outcome of abolishing the profit motive
As soon as the profit is gone the ukranians starve
You hate to see it!
@@jukebox_heroperson3994 That's authoritarianism combined with a commitment to communal living. Communism is simply a stateless, classless society where manufacturing is based on need without explicit exchange, and nothing about that requires causing an enormous famine and killing or imprisoning all your political rivals. Very few modern communists would support such actions.
Depressing Disasters to Relax and Study to
Coming off a night of reading depressing public health textbooks and writing about pandemics for college, following the protests across the US all day and I decided to watch wtyp Bhopal part 2 of all things to unwind so boy if that isn't ever spot on.
The discussion about how celebrating heroism erases the suffering of the actual human beings involved reminds me of the Discworld quote, where the Patrician suggests putting up a statue with 'They did the job they had to do' and Vimes responds:
"No. How dare you? How dare you! At this time! In this place! They did the job they didn’t have to do, and they died doing it, and you can’t give them anything. Do you understand?"
Vimes was always my favorite character in all the Disc.
The Night Watch storyline is Pratchett's best.
Reminds me of that rant from Joe Scott from Answers with Joe did on how labeling people "heroes" heroism erases their suffering from our minds and makes us all feel better about not actually caring for said "heroes". He was, IIRC, talking about the front-line workers during the pandemic, war veterans, and the firefighters who survived 911,.
@@RordamJ the only good cops are in Discworld
@@RordamJ
Nice username. Vultures are awesome.
That student dying after giving a child CPR is one of the worst things I’ve ever heard.
Gives new meaning to "kiss of life".
At least the student was successful, meaning the child lived. It's not much of a silver lining, but still.
The story of the tank just standing up vertically is not the kind of "uplifting content" I need right now.
Three years late but seriously, shout out to Liam for admitting the train conductor story made him tear up. It's nice to hear the emotional side, as tough as it is, because it reminds us all how we're all human. And yet, because India is seen as some backwards uncivilized place still in many places, they're suffering is somehow lesser. These people don't deserve to sit in their homes, afraid, and knowing that the fucking factory is STILL there and STILL LEAKING MERCURY.
thank you so much for reiterating the fact that these were people and that India and African countries absolutely should not be the western world’s dumping ground. i feel like we cannot EVER hear that or remind ourselves and others of that enough
(the edit was to fix sentence flow. i kind of broke it the first time around)
I've lived 18 months in India and my impression was that Indians wouldn't give a shit about any victims of anything if they were from a lower caste. And many folks over there truly believe that basically whatever happens to you is your karma.
Hindus also really aren't too fond of Muslims, especially in rural areas where they regularly lynch one or two. Lots of hate in India, and there's also palpable resentment towards the British and even other Europeans especially after a few bottles are consumed. Stones were thrown at the stranded tourists refused accommodation recently etc etc etc.
Many wonderful folks there but folks are folks just as you say so there's an unbelievable amount of xenophobic pricks with sociopathic tendancies.
Oh yeah and meth is getting really, really popular in Nepal and India. I walked into a couple of the wrong bars now and then and oh boy oh boy was shit pretty crazy.
So my gut feeling is the reaction from many Indian people were this to have happened in, say Pakistan, would be just as fucked up as ours. Bigotry isn't a peculiar western phenomenon.
@@SofaKingShit Doesn't mean we should be bigoted to them.
@@SofaKingShit yeah, that's casteism dude. that's why a million Hindu outcastes voluntarily converted to Buddhism after Ambedkar proposed it. that's why India has the largest communist movement of any capitalist country.
...and don't be surprised that capitalist press like NYT prints whiny articles by brahmin-american immigrants hemming and hawing about modi and doesn't tell you about these huge, systemic problems in india. as the other guy said, the fact that modi will gladly dump toxic waste on the poor doesn't mean it's a good thing when Larry Summers suggests exporting toxic waste to india.
@@SofaKingShit I mean, I don't think it's that unreasonable for a group of historically oppressed people to discuss their anger about their oppressors (particularly when the oppressors frame their actions as 'not that bad') especially after a few drinks
Bob, no, they don't. Shut up. Maybe the United States shouldn't spend so much time destroying sovereign nations! Then, we wouldn't destabilize entire regions! Just a thought. Please don't drag your racist nonsense in here.
Yo, just a quick thing:
When you highlight stuff, could you use a colour other than red? I'm colorblind and can't see red, so you are marking a black and white picture with a grey color, which makes it really difficult to see what you are trying to point out.
As far as I know gold works for all types of colorblindness, so that's what i'd suggest to use as the "to go" pen colour.
"You need to run _towards_ the danger"
Almost as if you were looking to..
.. _shake hands_ with it
*guitar riff plays*
*Shake hands... With Danger!*
I made a shake hands with danger reference today at work but nobody on my team understood what I was talking about
@@OkSharkey sad pronoun-checking noises
@@OkSharkey
Only YOU can prevent ignorance in the workplace.
On the theme of funny motions, in Germany there was a case where a tenant spread Sürströmming in the staircase of his apartment building. He was evicted immediately, but he took his landlord to court over the eviction. Initially the court agreed with the tenant that the eviction was unlawful (in Germany a tenant will generally have to be notified several months in advance and has to have done something worthy of eviction). The landlord, unhappy with the ruling, procured a tin of Sürströmming and opened it in court. And yes, the court immediately changed their mind, probably so that they could go to the next sink and throw up.
The Union Carbide legal defense is literally corporate Narcissist's Prayer.
" That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did...
You deserved it."
I noticed that too. Fucking ghoulish
I believe that a large-scale hydrofluoric acid spill wouldn't even leave skeletons. According to friends of mine who've worked in semiconductor plants (which make heavy use of HF to clean the silicon dioxide off the wafers between various fabrication steps), one of its fun properties is that the molecule is small enough to diffuse through your skin and *dissolve your bones from the inside*. In fact, if you're exposed to HF, the front-line treatment is to inject an alkaline solution *into the bone itself* to neutralize the acid before it does too much damage. This is, of course, excruciatingly painful.
Just another fun fact to lighten your day further
Every word with "fluor" in it is to chemists what "cyan" is to biologists and/or medical professionals.
@@BlarryOfficial That's kind of the theme of the "Things I Won't Work With" section of Derek Lowe's "In The Pipeline" blog (well, that, "really stinky compounds" and "molecules with *way* too many nitrogen atoms"): blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/things-i-wont-work-with When your job involves fluorine compounds reactive enough to *set sand on fire* (blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time) it may be time to review your career choices
@@KenKeenan1973 It always makes me happy when people recommend "Things I Won't Work With". It's delightful and informative
The front line treatment is decontamination and topical application of calcium gluconate gel. Calcium gluconate is sometimes locally injected around HF burns or infused into the circulatory system, but I cannot find any reference to intraosseous injection in the literature. I haven’t seen it done but reports I’ve heard about injections into HF burns involved rapid and dramatic relief of local pain.
The bone thing isn’t so much that it completely dissolves the victim’s bones as that the fuckload of fluoride ions floating around in their body, will fuck their shit up in a number of ways, most notably by readily reacting with important stuff like calcium and magnesium causing acute hypocalcemia, hypomagnesemia, hyperkalemia and any number of other issues. This will just wreak all kinds of havoc, but the hypocalcemia leading to arrhythmia and cardiac arrest is a pretty major one. Depending on the concentration, and this is the fun part, exposure may not be immediately all that evident as there may not be rapid burning, and the chemical poisoning thing may not happen until many hours later, which would make management of a large scale release in an urban area all the much more swell.
My understanding is most of the exposure cases with delayed insidious effects happen with lower concentration dilute hydrofluoric acid solutions, rather than the anhydrous HF a refinery would have in a tank, but without looking at plume models I would imagine wide dispersion of dilute solution is exactly what would happen in the event of some sort of industrial incident involving a huge tank of anhydrous HF. IDK, I file these sorts of facilities in the “should not be in dense urban areas” category along with things like ammonium perchlorate plants, lol.
@@hhlADSGHhadg Interesting; the "injecting into bones" business always sounded a little far-fetched to me, though maybe my friend misinterpreted the procedure being described, or exaggerated for effect. Either way, a HF spill on the skin sounds like a whole lot of no fun
The reason for there being no miniseries for this I think comes down to A: It was a western based company and B: There were no heroes, only victims and villains.
What about railroad workers?
Oh, yes, turned into bloody pulp. That's not very photogenic for a hero to be.
"It was a western based company" This! For a comparable situation. So many documentaries about the Aral sea drying up, but not one about how the delta of the Colorado River disappeared for the same reasons as the Aral Sea, mismanagement on a gand scale of the only water source in a dry environment. Easier to make something about somebody else than to look at something that may turn out to be about your own exploits.
That one student who gave his life to save a kid was a hero...
@@cookies23z Yes. As were the railroad workers. They shouldn't have had to be.
To the first point: They made a movie about the Deepwater horizon Oil rig distaster
To the second point: They made "don't look up" which basically has no heroes.
And now, Bhopal victims are making up a disproportionately large proportion of the COVID-19 deaths there, because of their existing lung damage.
It's awful :(
And I'm gonna take a wild guess that the Indian government did FUCK ALL to help them.
When you guys are talking about the blue angles, our pm ordered the Snowbirds (or version) to go on a cross country tour to raise morale. Sunday one crashed in to a neighborhood killing the media officer and leaving the pilot in critical condition because the aircraft were not fitted with 0-0 capable ejection seats.
Unfortunately, being 60 years old the trainer's were manufactured at basically the same time 0-0 seats were first being investigated/designed.
Yeah it basically firebombed a neighbourhood
And now they’re doing a flyover to honour the person who died
@@TheMrolio22 That's a bit of an exaggeration. The plane didn't break up in the air or anything it just hit the tree right in front of the house (and then the house).
I have a close family friend who lives a 3 minute walk from the crash site and said it is really contained physical damage wise to just a couple homes.
Between this, that mass shooting out east, that military helicopter crash a couple weeks ago and another incel attack in Toronto a couple days ago I'd say Canadian morale is at an all-time high.
Hi! Are you planning to make an episode about Love Canal? It has everything you like:
- name of the place is Love Canal, seriously, we should end here
- toxic waste dumping grounds
- upon which a school is built
- and another school
- school district being a landlord
- a "model neighborhood" project
- organic chemistry
- toxic puddles in people's backyards
- have I mentioned its name is Love Canal?
- eminent domain
- private company denying liability
- and this company is named Hooker
- hundreds of people poisoned
- about 4000 tons of benzene
Literally the only two things that are missing here are trains and french sounding names
The engineering brought me here the anger made me stay. Casual disregard for human life is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.
That's why it's called "Human resource", it's a resource to be managed. It's dehumanising. Cog in the machine.
Whatever “ism” is being employed has had its day in the sun for casual disregard of human life.
Hence the stellar safety record of Soviet and Chinese plants!
I wouldn’t call it casual disregard, it’s more like aggressive disregard.
Capitalism is when I don’t like something, the more I don’t like it, the more capitalist it is
On August 28th, 2008, at approximately 10:30 pm, an explosion occurred in Institute, WV, in a chemical plant mentioned in this podcast. Shrapnel from the explosion came dangerously close to rupturing piping to a tank containing just under 14,000 lbs of MIC. Although no MIC was released by the plant due to the explosion, the owners of the plant did not give any information to first responders, or the public. The wind was blowing in the direction of Charleston, WV, the largest city in the state with about 50,000 people. Had a release occurred, we may have seen a very similar situation to Bhopal. Although only about 1/4 the gas would have been released, the valley the plant is in would have made the cloud just as dense, and if no information had been made available, it is possible that many hundreds, or even thousands, could have been affected. I can almost garentee that if there had been a leak, MIC would have been banned on this scale. But because it happened in India, we seem to have the mentality of “We don’t need to worry about it. They are just a bunch of poor people in a poor country. It would never happen here!” Those folks have no idea how the world works. Sad, really.
Yeah I watch me a good bit of CSB and them describing the plant across from them made me think "huh, kind of sounds like that bayer crop science one" but thought maybe not since nice they didn't mention how much MIC was stored there, although I feel like the CSB report may have briefly mentioned a(ny) previous HF releases
So, uhhh I guess my point is if you posted that comment about when it exploded, there's a CSB report you can go watch now
This episode is serious AF. I really appreciate Liam and Alice re-iterating multiple times that this is absolutely the result of human action.
33 minutes in, hearing the obliteration of life in the aftermath, is gutting.
And the cops performing their role of protecting property owners who just killed almost 5k people is infuriating.
I'm at work, y'all. I can't be this sad and angry all at once right now.
It's very interesting how sometimes the opposite way of thinking will save your life. There was this mountain resort funicular disaster that had only five survivors all of which were guided by an off duty fire fighter who knew that, since the fire was in a sloped tunnel, the group would have to go down the tunnel rather than up, and since everyone else moved up the tunnel, away from the fire, and into the smoke, they all suffocated.
I too watched that... was it Seconds to Disaster episode?
They mentioned it.
@@marinary1326 It was--a beautiful example of a disaster that "couldn't possibly happen" happening after flammable materials were introduced during a retrofit (see also Grenfell Tower).
Oh hey that’s an episode now
Yo Dow chemicals' Wiki reads like a god damn villain's biography wtf lol
"DOW chemical doesn't give a shit,
Napalm sicks to kids"
If you want a good topic, the 1986 ship wreck of the Mikhail Lermontov in NZ. It is a total shitstorm of incompetence. First try and imagine the concept of a soviet cruise ship. It goes downhill from there.
They bring on a local New Zealand pilot to navigate the local hazards. He decides he wants to give the passengers a tour of a spot where several ships have wrecked (pause for effect). He then decides to take a short cut between a lighthouse and the shore. The obvious happens and they run aground and cut holes in the bottom of the ship. Then the local pilot instructs the crew to sail back onto the reef they crashed into. Fortunately the captain returns to intervene.
At some point a crew transmits a mayday. Following this some mysterious person retracts the mayday. Most likely one of the soviet political officers on board. This compounds into the ship to being directed to sail to a cove to deal with things. Unfortunately the ship sinks just out side of it. This cove has steep rocky shores.
Interestingly enough since the ship sunk in NZ waters, with a NZ pilot, the NZ govt says a full investigation isn't required. Since a full investigation wasn't conducted victims are having trouble fiing lawsuits.
Documentary can be found here: ua-cam.com/video/zTJgNjYBUoo/v-deo.html
No survivors? The pilot might have came from Australia - I mean hell
@@teslashark only one person died. The only thing that went right was several ships responded to the initial mayday call and didn't leave when the mayday was canceled. Watch the documentary I linked in the comment you replied to. Strangely Russia didn't do a lot of screwing up on this.
The idea of a Soviet cruise ship is in and of itself a disaster worthy of an episode.
As a New Zealander, I have never ever hear of this.
I can't believe Justin took so long to actually point out how radically much worse this disaster really is than Chernobyl was for the people involved
One of the hardest things about this podcast is hearing Liam's voice crack when he rants about the callous disregard for human life
I love Liam but sometimes I have to skip through his emotional bits. He has a hard time controlling that side of himself I imagine.
The only thing to come out of Bhopal is the fact that the business friendly Indian government thinks each Indian life is worth a maximum of 46875 dollars. That's what you get when you divide the settlement by each Indian dead in the immediate disaster. This isn't counting people injured, environmental damage and the loss of a whole portion of the city to habitation.
Growing up in Baton Rouge, LA and going to school less than five miles from a giant Exxon refinery we actually had chemical spill drills. They consisted of gathering everyone into the hallways and duct tapping the doors and windows closed.
The Soviets paid at least 30 times more per capita to the victims of Chernobyl than Union Carbide paid to the victims of this disaster.
Considering that the Soviet Union didn't even acknowledge most of the victims of Chernobyl, call me extremely skeptical of that claim. Also, per capita? Why the fuck would that matter?
@@Raptor747 The soviets paid out about $8 billion dollars to over 200,000 victims. Union Carbide paid out around $800 million to almost 600,000 victims.
Both numbers are in USD adjusted to 2018 inflation levels.
I used per capita because that's how you compare two events with different numbers of people involved.
If you need a topic how about the Granville rail disaster? It combines a train derailment, bridge collapse, almost every possible bad decision that could have been made, and an opportunity to make fun of Australians.
In my binge to listen to every episode I keep noticing whenever Chernobyl is mentioned. Pals, please be careful if you ever make a Chernobyl episode, Perevozchenko never saw the caps bouncing on the UBS, he was in the control room when the thing exploded. He would've had to run at something upwards of 120km/hr to make it to the control room from the reactor hall in the span of time people estimate thanks to Grigori Medvedev's weird assumptions on where everyone was. Sorry, I'm a Chernobyl researcher so I just hate to see misinformation on the topic. Love you guys.
Edit: It's 180km/hr, I consulted my friend who did the original calculation of that.
Next episode is on Chernobyl.
This episode especially pissed me off. Which means that it was properly done. Even with all the jokes, y’all did those poor innocent people justice by retelling this story in the manner in which you chose. Y’all are doing damned good work, and I would even go as far as calling it true journalism. This is well worth the measly $2 a month that I graciously, and happily hand over.
also re: covering engineering DISASTERS and not accidents, this is definitely even more reason you should cover United Airlines Flight 232, imo. engineering disaster but not 100% depressing because you can talk about the success of crew resource management (especially in the airline industry) and the way it ends is absolutely a disaster but also miraculous? and also in the face of what he is certain will be his death, the captain kinda says the funniest thing (in context) over radio to ATC. just suggesting it again because it fits your criteria but is one of those way less depressing topics you can slot in between topics such as the bhopal disaster
Maybe that should be integrated into one episode about the DC-10. That aircraft started out as being actually dangerous and nobody cared. When it was made safer the DC-10 was than blamed by the media for crashes that weren´t the fault of the aircraft, resulting in a literal fear of people taking flights on that plane. It also has the benefit that Justin could finally talk about his loved L1011, being the main rival of the DC-10.
GT Fan 8899 the tristar was so neat. meanwhile the dc-10 was just like [cargo door falls off]
also if they need potentially the worst and most useless guest of all time i’m ready to talk about phugoids
The DC-10 is one episode itself
Rehan Zainul Abdeen well i mean i feel like there’s three “the DC-10 is scary!” eras: the damn cargo bay door shit, that chicago o’hare shit maintenance job w the engine that made it break off, and the fanblade incident on 232
@Donoteat if you have to do a two parter again, I recommend putting a short recap (to refresh memory) in the intro of the second ep.
Definitely. I get that this one wasn't meant to be a 2 parter but a couple of lines from future donoteat recapping would be helpful
Or at least a "here's where we left off" doesn't need to be a full recap
Not all of us are americans in need of of hour long recaps every few seconds.
*dramatic voice* Previously on Well There's Your Problem...
@@1121494 though many of us have had depression and smoke weed so our memory is fucked
Y'all laying out your mission statement and central thesis is a high point of the show so far.
Laughs might have got me through the door but I keep coming back for the angry.
Never heard of Jawnobyl before but it reminds me of the near miss we had at the ExxonMobil refinery in Torrance, CA. If I remember right an oil fire blew something up and shrapnel came just feet from puncturing a tank of hydrofluoric acid big enough to kill half of South Los Angeles.
You guys gonna do an episode on the Tianjin chemical plant explosion?
tianjin gives me nightmares
Tianjin Port is not a chemical plant explosion, it's a chemical fertilizer storage explosion triggered by a gas main (or a sewage main) explosion. There was no chemical plant, but a bigass hazmat warehouse built using normal warehouse permits.
The explosion scale was comparable to a Davy Crockett nuke.
So a couple of Chinese cities use an old design of sewage plumbing lining; they basically form a voltaic copper/zinc battery when corroded to a degree, and ignite themselves when the flammable gas and oxygen mixture is just right.
@@teslashark - So basically a literal time-bomb?
@@TheMrVengeance Yep, a few weeks before 8/15 in another city there was a smaller sewage explosion that tore up half a street
Hey donoteat, have you seen Dark Waters? It’s a film about the DOW chemical company murdering a whole town with chemical runoff and the legal battle that continues to this day
Dow Chemicals: the final boss of humankind
A corporation’s customers are the share holders, and the consumer’s money is the product.
Ahahahaha
The consumers are raw materials, and the workers are grease
Loving your work guys/girl. I'm a chemical engineer by trade, so I have more than a passing interest in process safety. The Bhopal shitshow is used as a case study throughout the world as an example of 'how not to do it'. You nailed all the major points but missed a critical one when talking about the comparison with Institute.The process there created MIC in the same reactor that produced the Carbaryl so it was used at the same time as it was created, therefore no need to store large quantities of it on-site.
As an aside, i'd love to hear you do an episode on Piper Alpha. If you're not familiar with it, Alice can fill you in. It is a textbook example of that one in a billion situation where every single thing goes to fuck. In an indirect sense it also links in to what happened with Deepwater Horizon.
Also, shamelessly whoring myself out, if you do Piper Alpha, or any other process/oil/gas/chemical disaster, I'd love to be involved. Having spent the last 13 years working in it - including process safety roles, I think I could add some useful insight.
I would love to know of other videos or sites that interest you. I realize it’s a year later and you may be on the moon by now, but…
i read the "you want osama give us anderson" as a reference to the official death toll in 9/11 and the bhopal disaster and the men's roles as the heads of their organizations. they were saying anderson was their bin laden, that the chemical spill was their 9/11, not proposing a prisoner exchange.
On the subject of unexpected evacuation...
Its so mind numbingly scary and unreal, and I only had to get outta bed and run from a forest fire at 2am. At least a fire is fairly easy to see, couldn't imagine the terror we would have felt if we hadn't been able to see the flames getting farther behind us.
Yeah I was thinking about fires when they were talking about evacuating too. I used to live in a town that was one single lane road out and surrounded by very flammable national park. If you tried to run you would probably get burnt to a crisp. Every summer we got flyers telling us to not run if a fire ever came.
@@alexmckay1760
That town ought to either have another road out, or some kind of communal fire bunker built in town. Thanks to global warming, that town is a disaster waiting to happen.😐
Roz, one of the field engineers at the company I used to work at told me some stories about Sunoco in Philly. Once when he was up on a tower he looked down at some of the piping and there was what looked like a leak as the pipe was black, the Sunoco engineer took him over and showed him close up, the top of the pipe had rusted about a 2ft long hole and it was the flowing crude that he was seeing. He said of all the refineries he had worked at (we supplied petrochem equipment) Philly Sunoco was the worst.
As someone who has worked with isocyanates in an industrial facility before, I think I can explain the story of the second tank rearing up and then slamming back down. As water leaked into the tank, there would have essentially been a head built of foamy crystalline mess where the water was in contact with the isocyanate. Essentially, a thin styrofoam sheet was being formed by the reaction between the incoming water and the isocyanate. The water pressure likely led to a sort of temporary equilibrium in pressure, and when they cut the pressure supply off, that styrofoam separator would have failed instantly. This would have led to a rapid redistribution of mass within the tank, and the compressed isocyanate likely would have followed standard PVT laws and shot forward into the water, shifting its mass at an incredible speed towards the bulkhead where the valves were located. This would explain why the tank lifted up, and then after momentum had been dissipated into the surrounding concrete and earth, gravity would have taken its toll and brought it back down.
You know, I have been considering submitting a safety third on the chemical plant where I worked for a long time, and this episode makes me doubly convinced that I ought to.
So to dumb it down for brain-dead morons like myself: Water + chemical + pressure go cut = tank go jump.
this sucks. like, it's a great episode, you three did an amazing job , it's just...
this sucks
I've been going through your older episodes, and I think this and Bhopal 1 combined makes your magnum opus so far. I am a soulless ghoul with a lump of schmoo for a heart, but even I felt my eyes pricking at the stories of the overwhelmed hospitals. Thank you for telling this tale and emphasizing the humanity of it.
28:50 - AFAIK: Train proceed is vertical motion of a lamp. Train stop is horizontal motion of a lamp.
For the most part yes however, the driver of a Holiday Express with thousands of passengers is not going to bypass a major destination on the handsign of anyone. If anything it would be interpretted as the staff affirming that the next signal is at clear. But I as a train Engineer would not take that to mean 'dont stop here'. Aside from a radio transmission (which were uncommon worldwide in the 80s) there isn't much you can do that wouldn't involve stopping the train and explaining the problem.
*Bible Black being casually mentioned in an Engineering Disaster podcast*
Tbf if you're going to have a shop near an industrial plant you might as well sell Cigar by the volume right?
5 liters of cigar.
Makes sense to me!
But of course, it cant be multiple cigar. It is a single cigar that is 5 liters in volume.
@@awesomelyshorticles Yes.
He just said 1:45, not 1:45 am! I call shenanigans on that call out.
Looking forward to a more uplifiting episode next time, with, finally, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
Oh good, I can fill my daily quota of both horrific tragedy and interesting learning again. Thanks!
Does Liam listen to Hardcore History by Dan Carlin? He sounds like he either A) Would like the personal view that is used often or B) has been inspired by the personal views used. Also.... The skeletonized bodies of Philadelphians were found in a forest only a few days after this conversation.
Yes and yes!
Their legal defense has more layers than their process safety
Unsurprisingly.
15:55 Mission statement for WTYP summed up, very nice!
I feel that once you've worked your way through the well known disasters, the less well known ones will be even more sadly poignant because the forgotten ones are worse because not only have we not learned but we've forgotten
Much love, here for you if you need it
Spot on Alice! No one ever saw the fuel caps jumping up and down because :
- Steam needs to be leaking already if the caps are to move, so mostly you'll see a huge plume of steam instead
- The timing didn't allow anybody to witness such an event and walk
- The guy you're thinking about was actually in another room and saw the direct aftermath of the explosion through destroyed walls and steam filling the reactor hall
- HBO Chernobyl is a terrible documentary and basically regurgitates the soviet narrative
20:17 I once lived near a gas pipeline (not the type that delivers gas to homes). I got pamphlets every year about what to do in case of a gas leak.
My parents are nurses and my sister is in nursing school and some of her clinicals are on COVID-19 floors. They're not heroes, they're people, and I'm absolutely terrified for their safety. the healthcare system my dad works for and where my sister is enrolled have the bullshit Healthcare providers in capes thank you signs instead of better or even hazard pay and better psychological care, which is just so fucking infuriating to me.
In relation to the walking into the wind, that is a bad idea in the case of a prolonged leak because it's not a cloud of gas but a stream. You can't ne sure of thos in advance so don't walk towards a chemical plant in the case of an emergency. Having worked at a gas storage facility the thing they instruct you to do is walk perpendicular to the wind.
This also reminds me of something related to the personal gas detectors. At some point the people at the permit office would leave before the people on site, which is fine but they were supposed to charge the gas detectors. This resulted in them being empty quite often. When the detectors run out they go off, but at some point this happened so often that the first response to an alarm was just shutting off the detector under the assumption they were empty.
Really a very good safety culture there.
Yeah I would actually say, much like when you are on a train track, move horizontally. Move out of the line of the wind. In this case moving east or west would have done more.
Listening to this just keeps making me angrier and angrier. I went to www.bhopal.com (Note: The page is not SSL Secured ;)) and on the 'Cause-of-Bhopal-Tragedy' page they are still pushing the sabotage angle. Note they are couching this in the guise of a FAQ!
"Q. Who could have sabotaged plant operations and caused the gas leak?
A. Investigations suggest that only an employee with the appropriate skills and knowledge of the site could have tampered with the tank. An independent investigation by the engineering consulting firm Arthur D. Little, Inc., determined that the water could only have been introduced into the tank deliberately, since process safety systems -- in place and operational -- would have prevented water from entering the tank by accident."
My favorite thing is that the exact safety mechanisms they are touting there are documented and were specifically documented to have been intentionally disabled.
The scariest thing about this whole disaster was that an effective filter for all the byproducts and MIC could be made with a bottle, some pebbles, a straw and some tapwater. Straw to bottom, add pebbles, add water, suck on mouth of bottle pulling air down in through straw. If you add one or another mineral salt to this it is effective against a large number of water soluable or reactive gasses.
A late note about Institute WV. The plant was built next not to just any college, but one of the historically Black colleges, originally called West Virginia Colored Institute. Where better to work out the safety procedures for highly dangerous chemicals.
So a US corporation did (through malicious negligence) a chemical bombing on Indian civilian population and got off practically free?
*Justin Voice* Yes
@@dylanchouinard6141 How anyone isn't blackpilled, at this point, is beyond me.
OK... So we all agree we need to annoy HBO into making a miniseries about this right?
i’d say yes, but i’d worry they’d glorify union carbide or something
Experiment IV all the workers are just white actors in brownface putting on Apu accents while whacking the storage tank with hammers
Deez Noots i didn’t think anyone could make the hypothetical series about this worse and now i have to listen to the winner takes it all on repeat for an hour to cleanse my brain
came here to rewatch this in preparation to watch the netflix series...
"...they were trying to shoot the cloud" referring to the police earned the 'like'. Excellent stuff
The reason why nicotine is so addictive is that it over time creates a state where its absence from the blood stream triggers the "something is very very wrong"-alarm and the off switch is more nicotine. brilliant product really
The book, “There are no Accidents” is great about outlining the mindset of how these disasters happen.
Hopefully this disaster never sees an equal sequel.
Instead of seeing those accidents as bad luck you should see events that prevented those accidents from happening earlier as strokes of luck, and disaster actually happening as luck finally running out
Hi guys, thanks for another great episode or two.....even if the topic was a really depressing one. And thanks for reminding us all that everyone in the world is human, like you, me and everyone else on the planet.
Just wondered if you'd like to do a future episode on the history of Australian railways as a whole from 1854 onwards? In a nutshell, each state chose a different railway guage than its neighbours. Which meant that from 1927 until 1970, in order to travel by train from Sydney to Perth, it took a week or so and required around seven train changes simply due to the tracks being all different widths!
Even Douglas Macarthur was heard to point out, during WW2 (after travelling from Darwin to Adelaide) that the railways would help the Japanese a lot more than help us!
It wasn't until the 60s that we started to rectify the issue, but it still affects rail operations in Australia today.
Alice, if you want to speed up doing captions, use UA-cam to autocaption and then fix it, they're about 90-95% accurate these days, and it speeds up the process by about 3X 😌
20 minutes before the end of the episode was a great time for it to re-register that I live just blocks from a battery plant. Not sure how prone it is to exploding, but I distinctly recall a couple of kids who got jobs there out of high school because it paid well talking about all the shit they had to sign re: understanding the potential effects of long-term exposure to the stuff they were handling. Fun.
You know, the people who complain about you guys not being serious enough kind of makes me want to create a parody series that is just incredibly dry and bare bones and boring. Can call it something like Location of Failure Identified.
Sounds like a good sleep aid...
Time to distract myself with a different depressing disaster...Keep up the great work and can't wait for the tacoma narrows bridge!
My best friend since elementary school was sikh. Shes definitely the reason im as much of a leftist that i am. Her and her whole family are amazing
So... I hope to see an emergency pod on the dam that just broke in Michigan. Also, could you do a pod about how México ended up building a bunch of radioactive houses?
Did someone sell them uranium that wasn't depleted the whole way?
@@PanAndScanBuddy they sold Cobalt-60 to be precise.
Or Colorado? In the 1960s a processing mill working with uranium decided to get a bit more out of it and sold the processing residue to a local cement company. They used it to build nearly a quarter of the city of Durango. 1,000 homes had to be rebuilt because their foundations were radioactive.
*Laughs in my Tropico 4 Chemical Plant having only 8 Hour Workshifts*
That's not how you maximize exploitation labor and returns on capital so you can grow the productive forces of the island. 14 hour shifts forever!
Of course, industry in Tropico is state-owned by default. Nationalisation good
@@ClaudiaNW Exactly ⚒
That is such a fucking good point that treating people like heroes dehumanizes them and I realize that's what is awkward when you save a life and people know it. It's not that saving someone's life isn't a good thing exactly but it shouldn't be an exceptionally good thing. Framing it as a good thing kind of puts it in the position of being the opposite of a bad thing when anyone who is in the position to save someone's life should do it because it's the human thing to do. Being in the right place at the right time to save someone's life might be extraordinary because of the timing but the act itself should really be expected of someone. So, yeah, it feels better to be praised for saving someone's life than condemned for doing something bad but doing something bad is going out of your way to do something whereas saving someone's life when you have the ability to do so is just the human thing to do. I don't know if I explained that well but it made something click in my head because I could never figure out why saving someone's life caused me to have to sit in the car and cry for a while before I drove home after that hospital shift. The guy lived so I should be happy. People blamed me for saving his life and I technically did but that was what I was supposed to do and it still stirs up some emotions in you that you don't think you can feel because you're supposed to be happy that the guy lived and happy that people praise you for saving his life. There's just always been something kind of wrong about that.
Anyway, I do still have that CPR barrier from when I took CPR and I even have it in my wallet. I've never had to use it but it's there if the time ever comes.
About the refineries in South Philly... There is an article on hiddencityphilla about them blowing up frequently ever since. Articles name is "A Petaled Rose Of Hell: Refineries, Fire Risk, And The New Geography Of Oil In Philadelphia’s Tidewater".
I will never get over the tea break.
No comparison, but I recall being told to take shelter in West Chester PA in the late 1970s due to a chemical leak from some lab - it was the idle of the day and it stunk to high heavens, eyes burned, etc. As I drove home I tried to warn others but some didn't believe me, in spite of smelling the odor. We were very fortunate. I can't imagine no warning, waking up to it and the chemical cloud and symptoms getting worse and worse.
Tennesee, Arkansas, and Missouri are in a seismic zone (New Madrid) where many chemical plants are located. If there is ever another earthquake like what happened in 1811 a lot of people would be in trouble.
Many plants are located around Interstate routes 55, 40, and 269.
at long last. hope you guys are okay after your six hours of podcasting
I've been listening through WTYP episodes in release order, and this is the first one that broke me. Sobbed for a while when Justin was reading the casualty count. Fuck these companies and their inhumanity.
I would pay just about any amount for "Future Skeletons of America" merch.
This one had me in tears for moment or two...
9:39 "it drifted south and west"
draws lines southsouthwest and southeast
southsoutheast
Between this and the College episode, did I just witness three people collectively lose their fucking minds over the course of six hours?
yes
While in India, I asked someone I was working with how they could literally step over another human being without feeling a twinge of mercy or compassion. His response, verbatim, was "There's more than a billion people in India. I'll never see him again." That response absolutely blew my mind.
Bonus points for referencing the MOVE bombing. That incident would also make a great episode b.t.w.
Ah, good my favorite kind of anti-capitalist depression porn! Just in time for lunch!
Maybe some spicy rocks would have helped with this disaster
spicy rocks to assist the spicy air
@@Mikey-xz4vn Delivered with high-strength steel
@@theD0gfish Lmao. With stainless steel rivets.
I never looked closely at the profile picture, and for some reason thought it was the flag of New Jersey.
Which makes sense because NJ is one big disaster.
I live in NJ, and I can confirm this. I used to live in a city with not one but two superfund sites.
some day in the eventual future some thing that I have manufactured may fail, and people may die. I would be much less certain about the eventuality of it if any number of factors would be adsressed. 9 out of 10 of each of these concerns were causes by a actors other than me and not in my control. In all of my efforts to change this and make the world safer I have been ignored, reprimanded, or gaslit. The pill is sleek and black..
"I need another drink."
Jesus Christ, same...
33:23 this is by far the most horrific part to me. Imagine it's just another day at the hospital, when out of nowhere hordes of sick and dying people arrive, and it's *your* job to organize and treat them as best as you can without knowing what's happening and with little chance of saving any of them.
But you see, often tea and coffee have the same caffeine content only that tea has a much more gradual release so isn't as noticeable, but then also doesn't have a 'crash' like coffee does. The real Chad balances both alongside energy drinks for maximum effect
oh thank god now i can finally find out what happened. i hope nobody got hurt.
this is the only podcast i listen to and the only thing i pay for on patreon, i have zero regrets
"India has a lot of hospitals, it seems. India has its shit together, it seems."
Narrator: India did not, in fact, have its shit together.
The reason for the high number of hospitals in this area is to provide added treatment options for the people who were poisoned by this event.
We feed the algorithm.
why do we feed the algorithm, my children, my children
@@RoamingAdhocrat Because it keeps out the enemy.
Fluorine chemistry, always so fun and good.
There's a time in which a disaster has reached beyond the predicted or anticipated catastrophe into something which defies expectation, and then belief. It's hard to respond to that in a field of science or engineering when 99% of your life has been dictated by figures and manuals; that you are now a castaway in the unknown, and you must do something. There's really no one you can call on for help when the fuel rods start jumping, if they even believe you.