Hello Mark,
I read your whitewash editorial [Grasp All The Lessons Of Bhopal]. Shame on you for that! Tell the truth, instead of misdirection of cause-and-effect.
Bhopal was a terrorist act by a disgruntled employee who hooked up a water-hose to the tank. There was never any direct, engineered path for water to get into a MIC tank, and it is inconceivable that in a U.S.-engineered plant there ever would be.
As for the factor of a large number of people living in a shanty-town nearby, that's the natural result of the U. S. exporting its manufacturing to third-world countries with cheap regulatory environments and cheap labor. It's nothing personal; it's just Business.
Our domestic industry needed to learn how to protect itself against terrorist acts, but in spite of Postal employees occasionally going Postal, and various home-grown nutcases and even the abortive earlier attack with a car-bomb in the basement of the World Trade center, this country and its various industries NEVER DID LEARN the LESSON of protection against terrorists until 9/11.
Now, the country is hardened moderately, but there are still a lot of opportunities...the price of an open society under our Constitution.
The confront of evil is a very difficult thing, and virtually everyone falls far short on that score, and that's why we let one nut-case after another bomb FBI buildings and so-forth, and we continue to leave ourselves open.
The lesson Industry has learned only in a few areas such as nuclear power plants is HIGH SECURITY such that even one employee can not act alone to cause a disaster.
Making every chemical plant a Very Hard Target such that even no single employee, much less an outsider, can do harm, is the REAL lesson the industry needs to learn.
Steve Smith
