Bayer safety lapses 'could have eclipsed Bhopal'

[Hubert Flottz]

Source: By Ken Ward Jr. staff writer

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Significant safety lapses by management of Bayer CropScience's Institute plant caused a fatal August 2008 explosion that could have turned into a disaster worse than Bhopal, according to evidence presented Tuesday to a congressional committee.

Bayer plant officials continued to use long-deficient equipment, leading employees to bypass safety gear in the plant's Methomyl-Larvin unit where the explosion occurred, U.S. Chemical Safety Board officials told a House subcommittee.

The runaway explosion sent a 5,000-pound chemical vessel rocketing into the air and across the plant, where it could have easily smashed into a nearby methyl isocyanate tank, "the consequences of which could have eclipsed the 1984 disaster in India," congressional committee staffers concluded in their report.

"Had I known then what I know right now, I would have ordered an evacuation," Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper said after testifying and listening to other witnesses at the hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in Washington, D.C.



Read more: http://www.wvgazette.com/News/200904210805

---

More on the Bayer plant explosion story I posted yesterday. If the methyl isocyanate tank had been breached in that explosion thousands of people in this area could have been killed outright, or doomed to a slow painful death in the months and years afterward. Bush's "Homeland Security" bullshit helped Bayer cover this up for almost a year, but now the real story is being told.

[bananas]

1. I missed your post yesterday

Do you have a link to it?

[Hubert Flottz]

3. Here you go...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=3841501&mesg_id=3841501

[bertman]

2. Thanks for posting this, Hubert. I'll read the link later. Recommend.

[Hubert Flottz]

5. You are quite welcome.

For those who might not remember what happened in Bhopal India On 3 December 1984, here are some links to that sad story.

Bhopal, India
In the middle of the night of December 2-3, 1984, residents living near the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India awoke coughing, choking, gasping, and in the case of thousands, slowly dying. Half a day later, half a world away, company executives sleeping soundly near the Danbury, CT headquarters of Union Carbide Corporation awoke in the middle of the night yawning and grumbling at the sound of telephones ringing… shortcuts taken in the name of profit — authorized by the highest executives within the company — had just killed thousands of innocent citizens. It was the worst industrial disaster of the 20th century, forever changing the public’s trust of the chemical industry. Union Carbide claimed it was sabotage by a disgruntled employee that led to the disaster, but how much did the company already know about the dangerous conditions its shortcuts and bottom-line focus had created?

Documents recently uncovered in litigation and obtained by EWG demonstrate that Union Carbide cut corners and employed untested technologies when building the Bhopal plant. The company had forged ahead with the unproven design, knowing that it posed a “danger of polluting subsurface water supplies in the Bhopal area” according to a Carbide document marked "Destroy after use." Shaving costs and maximizing profits took precedence over ensuring the safety of plant workers and the surrounding communities. Read More...

http://www.chemicalindustryarchives.org/dirtysecrets/bhopal/index.asp

Twenty Years Later, Bhopal Toxic Disaster Drags On

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=&imgrefurl=http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2004/2004-11-30-10.asp&usg=__eOuxrzwzUrCb3DQdZtLN2VZJRc4=&h=205&w=280&sz=19&hl=en&start=4&um=1&tbnid=o-3CWWu4GD0TMM:&tbnh=83&tbnw=114&prev=/images%3Fq%3DBhopal%2Bdisaster%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1W1DKUS_en%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1

TED Case Studies

Bhopal Disaster

http://www1.american.edu/ted/bhopal.htm

Bhopal disaster

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

25 YEARS OF SPIRIT AND SURVIVAL: BHOPAL SURVIVORS' US TOUR, APRIL 14 - JUNE 1, 2009

http://www.bhopal.net/

[Mopar151]

4. I used to work for Praxair

Which is a piece of Union Carbide, spun off to "preserve shareholder value":sarcasm: They brag endlessly about their safety program, but 90% of it is sham and blame-shifting, and low level managers cut corners constantly because of absolutely relentless "bottom-line" pressure.:nuke: :nuke: Often with predictable results:grr: much as the Bayer managers did.


:banghead: This sort of thing will happen until criminial culpability of the ugly variety extends to the CFO level, and in particular, involves financial exeucitives sharing fully in the consequences of their actions.:argh: I'm not talking a genteel surrender in a DOJ office, either - I mean a full felony arrest,in the office, by the Charleston WVa. cops, and iron bars, high bail, and stinky winos, with a trial venue (including the Feds)local to the disaster.

[Hubert Flottz]

6. My Dad was one of the people that built the Sevin unit at the

Institute plant.

He died of small cell lung cancer in 1986 at age 55, after working for Union Carbide for over 20 years. When the Bhopal disaster happened he told me that the very same thing could happen here at Institute Wv.

Union Carbide was involved in another horrid industrial calamity here in West Virginia in the 1930's and they got away with killing hundreds of workers without paying hardly anything for their part in that disaster.(less than $1,000.00 per victim for white workers, while considerably less money was paid to the families of the hundreds of black tunnel workers who died from the rock dust)

"1500 Doomed": People’s Press Reports on the Gauley Bridge Disaster

The deadly lung disease silicosis is caused when miners, sandblasters, and foundry and tunnel workers inhale fine particles of silica dust—a mineral found in sand, quartz, and granite. In 1935, approximately 1,500 workers—largely African Americans who had come north to find work—were killed by exposure to silica dust while building a tunnel in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. Ordinarily, silicosis takes a several years to develop, but these West Virginia tunnel workers were falling ill in a matter of months because of exposure to unusually high concentrations of silica dust. The crisis over silicosis suddenly became a national issue, as seen in this article in the radical newspaper Peoples' Press. In 1936 congressional hearings on the Gauley Bridge disaster, it was revealed that company officials and engineers wore masks to protect themselves when they visited the tunnel, but they failed to provide masks for the tunnelers themselves, even when the workers requested them. More...

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5089/


About the Hawk's Nest Incident--Background for Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead

snip...

HOW MANY DIED?

An actual number of how many people died as a result of silicosis in Gauley Bridge has never been reached; however, the estimate has been set at around 700 deaths. There have been no authoritarian documents to tell us what exactly happened. The victims remain for the most part anonymous. There were no headstones for the graves that have been found. The numbers of how many died vary in different reports, just as the causes of these deaths were constantly debated. The agreement has always been reached right around 700. The one consistent factor is that proportionally more blacks than whites died in this great disaster. Black deaths were also underreported, thus skewing the number of deaths even further. Investigators tried to obtain more information about deaths at this time through a comparison of county records. This process proved futile since many records were only accessible through a certain date, thus, leaving several incomplete files. It was also difficult to find a "normal" death rate for the time to compare the death rates of these workers with. These records also did not account for the numbers of migrant workers who left the area after completing their work and possibly died from silicosis elsewhere. Cherniack also derived that there have been no statistical means by which the total amount of suffering and despair of these afflicted people could be measured. More...

http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/poets/m_r/rukeyser/hawksnest.htm



Reliving the Hawks Nest disaster

By Susan Williams
Staff writer


According to West Virginia Archives & History, workers broke ground March 30, 1930, at Gauley Junction to start construction of the Hawks Nest Tunnel and dam. The tunnel and dam are still in use today, but before the construction was completed, many workers died from breathing the silica dust as they bored through the mountain. More...

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/mountainmemories/200903310604


Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk's_Nest_incident

HAWK'S NEST TUNNEL DISASTER

http://www.wvculture.org/history/notewv/hawksnest.html

Information about this is kind of scarce...proof that Union Carbide's PR crew worked hard to cover their tracks.

[Hubert Flottz]

7. Here is something that I have wondered about for a long time.

Bayer cuts price of ciprofloxacin after Bush threatens to buy generics

The Bush administration has won a major price concession from the German drug company Bayer AG for its antibiotic ciprofloxacin (Cipro), after threatening to buy generic alternatives.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had recommended ciprofloxacin as the antibiotic of choice for both inhalation and cutaneous anthrax, although this week it changed its advice, and decided to recommend doxycycline.

Dr Bradley Perkins, an anthrax specialist at the CDC, was quoted in the New York Times (2001;Oct 30: B8) as saying that the centers were now recommending doxycycline because drug resistance was “less of an issue with doxycycline.”

Before the new advice was issued, however, Bayer agreed to sell 100 million tablets of ciprofloxacin to the government at 95 cents (66p) each—54% of its original wholesale price of $1.77. Three other drug manufacturers said that they would supply large quantities of their antibiotics free if the Food and Drug Administration approved their use for the treatment of anthrax. More...

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1121539

So right after the anthrax scare we see Bayer being awarded this huge contract for ciprofloxacin, even though American made generic drugs would have served the same purpose for far less money. Coupled with the fact that Bayer AG had just lost a case brought by survivors of the Nazi death camps, in which Bayer AG was found at fault and was going to be liable for a huge payment to these plaintiffs. Also coupled with the fact that Prescott Bush was an American operative and paid associate of Bayer's AG's German parent company IG Farben. The same IG Farben that built the huge Buna plant in Poland during WWII, using slave labor from the Auschwitz death camp complex near by.

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

Snip...

Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush's involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.

The first set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.

The second set of papers, which are in the National Archives, are contained in vesting order number 248 which records the seizure of the company assets. What these files show is that on October 20 1942 the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. By November, the Silesian-American Company, another of Prescott Bush's ventures, had also been seized.

The third set of documents, also at the National Archives, are contained in the files on IG Farben, who was prosecuted for war crimes. More...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar

BTW, "War Crimes" and unquenchable greed just seems to run in the Bush family.

[Mopar151]

8. Didja ever hear of Marvin Bush?

Subject: The Bush family....
Message:
Why is it that slime bags seem to gravitate to the chemical business, all over the world? At least the DuPonts had the brass to live next door to their plant.

Smedley Butler was right!

[Hubert Flottz]

9. Welcome to DU Mopar 151...

I'm an old Mopar person myself.

I guess because the Bush Klan can lie, cheat, steal and maim without remorse so well, that they just fit right into that same slimy groove.

[autorank]

10. K*R Chilling

I've been to Charleston. It's a compact area, nice town too. I can't imaging how awful that
would have been.

What an outrage. GREAT POST!!!

[Hubert Flottz]

11. I guess Bayer is ready to write this nice little town off...

rather than spend the money it would take to make their's a safer operation.

[autorank]

12. Well, that shows theire ass doesn't it.

What fools. Total.