Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act - Background

Background

During the early morning hours of December 3, 1984, a Union Carbide plant in a village just South of Bhopal, India released approximately forty tons of Methyl Isocyanate (MIC) into the air. Used in the manufacture of pesticides, MIC is a lethal chemical. The gas quickly and silently diffused over the ground and, in the end, killed, by some estimates, upwards to 5,000 people and injured 50,000 more. The only other place in the world that Union Carbide manufactured MIC is at its Institute plant in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia.

A week after the Bhopal accident, on December 11, 1984, Hank Karawan, then plant manager of the Union Carbide's Institute facility, held a press conference at which he expressed his confidence in the safety of the Institute plant's operations:

All of us here at the Institute plant have been deeply saddened by the tragic event in India and we extend our sympathy to all the people in the city of Bhopal. I am pleased to have the opportunity to make a point here this morning. Employees of the Institute plant have been manufacturing MIC in an effective and safe manner for seventeen years. We are extremely proud of that safety record. We are confident in the ability of our trained, dedicated, skilled, and experienced people. We are confident in the equipment that we operate, the safety precautions that we utilize, the monitoring systems that we have, and our plant emergency preparedness.

Despite Mr. Karawan's vote of confidence for the safety of the MIC operations at his plant, Union Carbide elected to shut down production of the deadly chemical until it could make $500 million worth of safety improvements. On May 4, 1985, Union Carbide resumed production of MIC. On August 11, 1985, on the heels of the completion of the safety improvement program just a few months before, 500 gallons of aldicarb oxime and highly toxic MIC leaked from the Institute plant. Although no one was killed, 134 people living around the plant were treated at local hospitals.

Both the Bhopal and the Institute incidents underscored the reality of modern-day chemical production—no matter what safety precautions are taken, no matter how well trained a plant's employees may be, and no matter how prepared a plant may be to handle an emergency situation, accidents will occur and people will die. Indeed, around the time of the Bhopal disaster, 6,928 chemical accidents occurred in the United States within a five-year period. In response to this growing threat, the United States Congress passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) in 1986.