— Effect of MIC on
humans and the antidotal treatment was not known to the medical fraternity
and such knowledge if available was not disseminated to the emergency
services.
— Poor plant maintenance
practices.
— Economy measures,
overriding safety concerns.
— Densely populated
areas around the plant.
— Lack of effective
emergency medical facilities.
— People sleeping in
exposed areas, jhuggies, road-side, on pavements/ railway platforms.
— Administration
collapsed with key functionaries running for their lives instead of manning
key positions.
— Relief
operations became difficult as the disaster caused total confusion and
affected the ability and mental strength of those entrusted with
emergency relief.
Lessons learnt:
— knowledge of the chemicals that were being stored.
— Emergency — accident — management manual should exist.
— Emergency procedures should be rehearsed at pre-prescribed intervals.
— Maintenance procedures and schedules should be strictly followed.
— knowledge of nearest medical facilities
— System of contacting top factory management.
— Residents living in the vicinity should be aware of the risks and trained to respond to emergency services.
The
leak was a watershed in formulating environmental legislation the world
over. The laws also require civic bodies and local officials to plan on
how to address a potential disaster situation.
Hindsight and way ahead:
Sheila
Jasanoff in her book ‘Learning from Disaster?: Risk Management after
Bhopal’ has provided a deeper insight into what are the issues to be
really addressed and the lessons we need to learn from such disasters
that not only provide a wider perspective to risk management, but also
give us, as human beings, food for thought.
“Although ‘hard’
engineering played its part in precipitating the events, the plant’s
defective components — the leaking valve, the broken refrigeration
system, the malfunctioning warning signal, and the inadequate storage
tank — were themselves the symptoms of more deep-seated social problems.
These
included the dearth of medical and scientific knowledge about an
extremely hazardous technology, the imperfections of information
transfer across national boundaries, the lack of regulatory resources in
a still developing country, the absence of workable relief and
rehabilitation plans, and the profound imbalance of economic power and
legal and managerial expertise between nations of the North and the
South.
Many of these deficiencies became apparent only in the
aftermath of Bhopal. Corrective policies have to address not only the
design of artifacts, but also (indeed, perhaps even more so) the human
practices and presuppositions that determine their management and use.
Seen from this perspective, a serious technological mishap ceases to be
merely accidental, for it opens windows onto previously unsuspected
weaknesses in the social matrix surrounding the technology.
Stringent
environmental regulations in developed countries have driven ‘dirty’
technologies to developing countries, where they operate under
disaster-prone conditions. Disasters are particularly likely to happen
when there is a sharp disjunction between the social order that gives
birth to a technology and the one in which it is eventually deployed.”
The
recent ‘oil spill’ in the Gulf of Mexico has again highlighted the need
for availability and strict adherence to mitigation procedures as
non-availability of these impact the very existence of the entity.
