Bhopal in America

[Derek Jackson]

In OTL there was an appalling industrial disaster in India. Union Carbide the US based company which ran the plant also had plants in the US.

Could they have caused an equivalant disaster in the US?

How big an impact would that have had?

[Melvin Loh]

Yeah, i remember back in late 1984, as a kid, hearing about the Union Carbie disaster at Bhopal.

If such a chem disaster had happened in the US, wouldn't there have been a much bigger uproar and mass litigation on a grand scale potentially outshawdoing anything else in legal hist ? I suppose such a mass lawsuit would be larger-scale scenarios of such pollution-related lawsuits portrayed in Hollywood movies like that 1 with John Travolta whose title I don't recall, and ERIN BROCKHOVITCH.

[Torqumada]

Well there was a chemcial release here back in February due to a train derailment. If not for the very strange weather pattern that day and the following day the cloud of chlorine gas would have spread further, faster and killed more people. If it had happened later there would have been a school full of middle school students right in the plume and the factories surrounding the site would have been packed with workers. Its quite possible and very easy to happen. The fact that it hasn't has probably been a combination of dumb luck and regulation.

Torqumada

[MerryPrankster]

In Bhopal, there were several problems...

1. The Indian government insisted that a certain number of Indian workers be on duty, regardless of how skilled they were (some were not).

2. The Bhopal plant was not a top-of-the-line facility, so accidents were more likely to happen (I think).

In the US, something like the Bhopal disaster would have never happened. There could be a disaster of a similar magnitude, but I don't think it would have been a transplanted Bhopal incident.