Haryana is an event briefly alluded to in
"The Dover Test", and clearly takes the place of the
Bhopal disaster despite being mentioned as occurring in 1986 instead of 1984.
To make a long story short, IRL a chemical plant in the city of Bhopal that produced chemicals made for pesticides, owned and operated by the US-based
Union Carbide, accidentally released nearly 50 tons of the extremely toxic chemical
methyl isocyanate (MIC) into the city when a tank containing it became over-pressurized. Thousands died from it, and half a million people were exposed. Many of the people injured were injured for life, and
the long-term health effects on the city and survivors are horrifying. Union Carbide, blamed employee sabotage for the disaster (despite damning testimony and evidence of corporate underinvestment that caused malfunctioning equipment that led to the disaster being possible, and a lax safety/regulatory culture that ignored or downplayed other instances of workers being exposed or killed by exposure to the highly-toxic chemicals they were producing), but also paid almost a billion dollars from lawsuits over the disaster, and none of the people ultimately in charge were ever punished. Its Indian subsidiary had its name changed and the company itself was later bought by Dow Chemical. It's widely considered the worst industrial disaster in history.
Haryana is
worse.
The show writers didn't seem to realize that Haryana is a state, not a city (we don't call Bhopal the "Madhya Pradesh disaster" or Three Mile Island the "Pennsylvania meltdown" for example). So I had to make it so that the company responsible (Cultico, a company Leo worked for at some point after the disaster) had an accident that happened in a plant in the city of
Faridabad similar to what happened IOTL in Bhopal. But unlike OTL Bhopal, where one tank was over-pressurized, in TTL Haryana, it's two tanks of MIC that vent all of their contents into the surrounding area, meaning that when an eastern wind blows through, MIC is carried 35 miles (21 miles) east to the city of
Gurgaon to fall on unsuspecting residents.
The only saving grace is that both Faridabad and Gurgaon combined only have
slightly more people than Bhopal, but otherwise the story is still enraging ITTL. Cultico changes its name (as mentioned in the show) and does actually do a better job of cleaning up and dissembling their Faridabad plant than Union Carbide did at the Bhopal plant (Union Carbide literally left the Bhopal plant pretty much standing after the Indian government was done investigating the disaster.
Here is the tank that leaked the MIC gas. They literally took it out of its cracked concrete casing, put it somewhere else on the plant grounds and left it there).
The photo is an OTL memorial statue in Bhopal for the victims of the tragedy, done by an ATL person.
