This week, Farz takes us to 1980s Bhopal, India, where thousands of people were poisoned by the air outside of a Union Carbide pesticide plant. It's just what you think might happen. The buck was passed over and over again, but essentially, water got into a gas tank, and the tank leaked; clouds of poison chased people and animals around the town leaving many dead and many more hurt for life. If you google it you will see some really terrible images that we didn't include. That's on you. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/ - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: doomedtofailpod@gmail.com
This week, Farz takes us to 1980s Bhopal, India, where thousands of people were poisoned by the air outside of a Union Carbide pesticide plant in the Bhopal Disaster. It's just what you think might happen. The buck was passed over and over again, but essentially, water got into a gas tank, and the tank leaked; clouds of poison chased people and animals around the town leaving many dead and many more hurt for life.
If you google it you will see some really terrible images that we didn't include. That's on you.
Some sources = https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/12/bhopal-the-worlds-worst-industrial-disaster-30-years-later/100864/
Bhopal | Issues | Dow Corporate
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Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
Music] in a matter of the people of State of California versus orthal James Simpson case number ba09 and so my fellow
Americans ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your
country there we go we are on track ready to get going it is 7:00 here it is
5 for you it is already dark it feels like dinner time I know
the whole thing who's this for is this for the farmers yeah I think so it was like
something with the farmers so they would have more Daylight or something and then now they have less daylight but like I
don't really know and I know that we voted for it in California to not do it anymore because like Arizona and Hawaii
don't do it and then that is stuck in whatever somewhere in DC because there's
someone somewhere rep who has one to make it national that you have to do it so like the fact that we voted that we
don't want to do it doesn't matter because that guy's like in the middle of like ruining everyone's day oh my God so annoying I really hate this but whatever
we're stuck with it um cool well let's goad and kick things off welcome to do to fail the podcast we cover two stories
one historic One True Crime about events that are doomed to fail joined here by
fars and Taylor how are you Taylor I'm good how are you being very
official and formal I'm good I'm good I've been in very doomed to fail head space cuz I literally just wrapped up my
research and so I'm like already you look a little scary right now it's dark you you could you could be wearing a
cloak I don't know I'm not sure what you're wearing you're wearing it little hoodie very low cut tank top and a
hoodie so I going to be cloak looks like you have demon horns because you have that bull behind you it does look scary
and I CL things and the mes is watching TV in the other room and so I'm Clos the
door so now there's no light at all in here so yeah very do you have a a lamp
do you have a no I have this thing here let me turn this on maybe this will make
it better here does this look better I mean it doesn't I
mean that's weird what is that like a fake fish tank no it uh it has like it's
like a it's a humidifier thing oh I have one too mine here mine looks like an egg
here's here's mine fun yeah it's one of those got it with my FSA
money hold it under my face wait your FSA paid for that is it cool yeah dude
they PID for human fires I did not know that it's for your health I'm a sucker I
paid for this out of pocket um shouldn't have um yeah yeah
it's yeah I'm good we had I went to a birthday party today for one of Florence's friends uh there was a horse you liked
it did you ride the horse I oh God no gross
it's 2023 there's literally no reason to write horses um no fa fa my most tra I
thinking my most traumatic child was when we had to do it we we did
like a camp field trip for like a weekend Elementary School and at that time I was like super fat I was like a
pudgy little thing and there was a part where we had to go like ride horses and that was part of the camp Retreat and I
was so embarrassed that I couldn't get up that I was like I'm scared of horses so I was like I'm not going to ride and so me and like this one dad just stayed
behind so because I wouldn't have to get on the horse that's really sad and now here I
am there you are living in Texas yeah know I like to think that there's like
some ancestor of mine from like 500 years ago ago some like farm girl in
Europe who was like this [ __ ] sucks [ __ ] this [ __ ] and I'm living her animal free dream and I'm happy to be carrying
that for her good good good you're you and your ancestors proud um Liv inside
living inside with conditioned air of all things it's wonder I have this humidifier [ __ ] you
got a humidifier you're all set uh I think am I the first to go today you
are what are you going to be consuming
coffee actually or no I'm drinking tea but coffee is my I try to stick to a
theme so my theme is coffee in real life I'm drinking tea got it got it I'm drinking water because I'm actually
drinking water and because it's topical to the topic that I'm discussing which is topical water that's good see okay
well let me I'll go ahead and kick things off this might be a bit of a long one actually I think doing a tight 30
Okay so we are back to engineering disastrous today and actually I know I
thought about like splitting it up the way you did yours the volcanoes so I was like people just get bored of listening to like engineering stuff and then I was
like I started going down a rabbit hole about this one specific disaster was like this is too good I gotta keep going and so here we go whatever you skipped a
week and it's fine there's there's no rules there's no rules it's just right
yeah I'll back house so this one is like
the kind of an engineering disaster that like really sparked my interest engineering disasters because it is so
horrific and so traumatic and the magnitude of it and the scale of it was so huge and the amount of issues and
reasons why it happened was so obvious and transparent it like a weird convergence of like horrible horrible
outcome one of the worst in human history mixed with so many different ways where it could have been
preventable that that wasn't realized and so I'm going to go into this topic but I will say that there I'm going to
be referen ing some images for this and they are going to be disturbing so like Google them if you want to but you don't
have to um and put them on the soci but they'll be optional yeah yeah and also
there is um there's a ton of like um YouTube
content out there about this disaster as well as a 2014 Martin Sheen and Cal pen
and Mesa Barton movie that's made about it so it could be fun to go watch I heard it's mixed reviews but it should
be interesting if those people make sense in the sentence so that is exciting well it the events happen in
India and cpen was like a fake journalist during that time oh I mean hilarious um I I feel like I should plan
to have nightmares about this I've been having nightmares that I missed our friends champagne toast the night before their wedding like that's my nightmares
at the moment so I'm really excited to have an actual nightmare yeah let's add on to it then so the topic I'm gonna be
discussing okay so my whole point was go look at the YouTube videos because I I think if you were to see the imagery of
what I'm talking about it would really paint a picture for you of like what was going on and what it must have been like
to be in this situation so the topic I'm going be discussing is called the Bal disaster Bal is spelled b is in boy ho o
p is in party a l
Bal so it is widely consider I'm so sorry that I laughed because you P for
party and This Disaster cool well because at first I was going to say P for p and I was like you can't
Define it with whatever you understand um indeed so this is this is widely
considered to be the worst industrial accident in the world and it came at a
really strange time it came during this like weird 1980s greed is good
corporations [ __ ] over the little people Chernobyl was just two years a little over two years after this and so
there was like a lot of things that were like falling apart like the Domino was falling of like these shitty companies
doing shitty things and getting away with it uhhuh and this was the worst of
that like worst than Chernobyl it was a big deal so the disaster we're going to
be discussing took place between December 2nd and December 3rd so of 1984
so it basically started at like 11:45 p.m. on the 2 and like ended like 1:00
a.m. on the third so it's just it falls within that kind of um time bracket and
it happened in a part of India known as M Mia prish which is a basically it's
like a shanty town like it's really not even like a city like picture picture
like hubs like Hooverville era kind of homes and that's basically what it was
one thing I thought about when I was researching this um this episode was how there's like a form of privilege I never
thought of before with which was I was never raised next to a pesticide plant a
chemical Factory a nuclear power plant like none of that stuff and no totally I
was just talking about that with my husband like we're so lucky that we have walls I know like I said that to my 500y
old ancestor but there's plenty of people that don't have walls you know they live in those like corrugated steel yeah Shanty towns all over the world
millions of people you know that's basically what this was I actually looked into this ear it's actually a
term that was coin in like the late 1980s called environmental racism which is basically the convergence of like
four factors I didn't write the factors here but it was something in the effect of um companies trying to maximize
profits meaning they needed to acquire land at a very low cost the people who were in that area having no political
power and not having the ability to be mobile due to Poverty so like all these factors kind of converge this
environmental race was like let's put this horrible horrible thing next to these poor people in India who literally
live in like cardboard boxes because they don't have a choice right that's Bas right they can't leave which we've
talked about with like disasters before like or like living in unsafe spes like if people could move out of Philip
Michigan they would but they can't sell their houses you know like there's there's nowhere to go right so like in a lot of cases yeah so the main antagonist
of the story is a company called Union Carbide which sounds like an amazingly
evil Corporation it sounds like one of those RoboCop movie corporations oh my God totally and Union
Carbide they were a chemical manufacturer and there most most of it did this for industrial use and in 1969
it built this Factory in Bal to produce a type of pesticide called 7 s v i n
which that name sounded familiar to me I think it's like a I think that's the brand name but it's also used like a
bunch of other stuff I think it's like roach spray and whatever it's like all it's all that kind of stuff
part of the production process of creating seven includes the use and creation of a um chemical known as
methyl isocyanate which sounds really bad because it is it goes It goes also by the term mic
but mic is like an internal nomenclature the science world knows it as methyl
isocyanate and that's going to come in useful and handy to know that later on mic is a colorless flamable liquid that
is very very bad for human health if you come in contact with it and either it's
liquid or if it's heated it's and boiled it's vaporized form the side effects are a lung Adema which is basically drowning
in water in your lungs while you're above ground burning of your eyes your nose
your throat hemorrhaging of your lungs which means you drown with your lungs full of blood instead of water this time
overall it has a very very high death rate if it comes in contact with someone and there's no antidote for it there's
no way to mitigate death is that as a gas as a gas yeah oh yeah okay and on
December 1st 1984 employees of this Factory started feeling kind of the milder effects of mic poisoning they'
complain of chest pain coughing irritated nose eyes and throats and so
they started investigating it so by late December 2nd it was concluded that
somehow water had found its way into a tank called e610 610 which e610 had two
sister tanks that were all next to it this is the one that became contaminated with water and at that time it contained
42 tons of mic that alone was problematic because that's actually not how you're supposed to store it you're
so the entire capacity of the tank is 60 tons but you're only supposed to store it half full because the other half has
to be inert gas to prevent water from getting in and O oxidizing and corroding
the the chemical compounds and releasing his gas I I kind of get that CU they
don't like they don't like fully fill up our propane tank you know it's like the gas is in there and then there's like
air or whatever yeah there's a really good reason for that the reason for that is exactly what we're going to discuss like like there's like 70 reasons why
this happened and that is one of the obvious reasons why it ended up happening but it also shows 70 reasons
why these happen yeah yeah but but it also shows at the Baseline of like how
obviously preventable so much that [ __ ] was just don't do the thing that you're told not to do and you should be fine
but you compound that with the other 100 things you weren't supposed to do that you ended up doing and now you're [ __ ] so totally so again 42 tons worth of
this this um liquid compound is in this tank called
e610 water being introduced to mic has the ability to create a chain reaction immediately reacts to it and it starts
vaporizing the liquid mic in turning it into a gas which generates heat which
increases pressure make sense yes so this night they noticed
that the pressure inside of e610 had increased from 2 PSI to 10 psi in the
span of 30 minutes these guys were like this is a mistake it's a faulty reading like there's an the pressure gauge is
faulty that's the only reason but also they already knew people were getting sick like people were already falling
off from my poisoning so they should have known something was going
on it sounds like well it sounds like they should
have had some sort of canary right to get sick first that's true we should always have one Canary gauge above every
M mic tank yeah
um wait I had something else from what you just said well it sounds like they should have like been aware that like
things were happening it'll come back to me well so by 11:45 p.m. on December 2nd it
was clear enough that something was going on that they reported to their supervisors they had an issue with this
tank and the supervisor oh I remember my thing oh go ahead I'm so sorry you
remember did did you watch this Chernobyl show I feel like that you might have watched I've seen like two of
the episodes there's like a whole part it where they're like whatever like they're
measuring like they're in like radiation they're like if it goes past like you
know 15 then like it's really really bad but so all the measurements like went to 15 and they were like well it's not that
bad it didn't go past 15 that's a madeup number but you know what I mean none of the none of the machines could even read
further than that so when they finally got another machine it was like 3,000 but like they never would have they
wouldn't have known what the machines they had because they didn't go up to that number yeah you know yeah again it's like it's like one of like a
thousand things going wrong the results in this kind of stuff happening I'm going to close that story me out that it's open makes feel like someone's
going to start running at me so at 11:45 p.m. on December 2nd
again they had realized there was probably something really wrong they went to their supervisors and said hey
we have this issue but at that time they were 30 minutes away from a tea break so at 12:15 a.m. on December 3rd
was a scheduled te break and they said like drinking tea literally like
drinking tea okay and they were like let's put this on hold let's put a pin
in this we'll come back to it after tea time but like again this is a chemical
Chain Reaction it's happening at the speed of sound like there is no you can't take a break yeah this is not like
let's go check out the Black Friday sales then come back and deal with this like it doesn't work that way the tea break ends
30 minutes later so it's 12:45 a.m. on December 3rd and at this point the pressure in the tank had gone from the
10 psi which the latest reading to 40 PSI which is really bad it's like about
to burst because the in the the amount of vapor that's being generated is too
much so at this point gases started being bented into the atmosphere already
because the seams couldn't handle that volume of pressure and so it started leaking out of the tank overall 30 tons
of gas had seeped out and been vent into the atmosphere before any alarm Bells were sounded so w usually what ends up
happening when at a facility like this where it having an issue could have
impacts further than the factory itself is that the alarm bells are connected to each other so if you were to sound an
all hands alarm inside this Factory everybody inside the factory would know something was up so you could try to
mitigate the issue or run away and it would sound an alarm outside the factory so everybody that's around the town
would also know that something was going on and be able to run away but right that was also one of the
safety issues was that they disabled the two piece two the one two punch of it
and so they sounded an alarm internally and then one tiny alarm went off for
like a split second outside and then it was disabled and because the systems been disconnected from each other
meanwhile everybody at the factory was running up wind away from the factory
the town was downwind so so the factory people knew what was going on and nobody was giving the alert of the All Hands to
anybody outside the factory SO gas is leaking out and
as as it starts kind of settling over the the city um people in the city
started reacting to it obviously and the police reached out to the folks of the factory and said hey we've got some
people getting really sick out here what's going on over there they said nothing to worry about it's all good everything's fine like this whole
attempt to try to cover things up started basically immediately as people were starting to flee and like I
mentioned before are chanties they're living in like cardboard boxes or like corrugated steel like they're trying to
run like nobody even has a car they're like trying to run away from this thing and you're running away from something
that you can't see right so you could see it because it was it was denser than
air which also meant that if you were young or infirmed like in a wheelchair
you were obviously dead like because because because it was denser than air
so it would come it would settle lower on the ground in the air col and so you're going to get a heavier dose of
it and add to that the fact that the local hospital when they started seeing initial reports of this exposure and
these illnesses they had no idea what was going on I mean they don't they don't know exactly what seven the
pesticide is made out of they don't know what mic is again that's a marketing language that's not actually what the compound is called they actually thought
they were deal with the spread of an ammonia leak they're like that's probably what what is going on that was
basically their best guess and when they called the factory to figure out what was going on they said it's mic and they're like uh okay like I don't know
what that is so sure we'll just deal with the symptoms I guess yeah they
should have been well they should have been super prepared for that right live next to it yeah well that was that was
the thing that later came up once obviously all this stuff goes to trial is they were like they couldn't be prepared for something that was so
impossible to happen like it was there were so many safety precautions that had
to be bypassed for this to end up happening and we're going to go through those one by one and so that's why they never dealt with it they never got to um
figure out a solution for this which really the solution you'll you'll you can see pictures of this later on when I
bring up the atlan particle about it but the solution would have been to put giant like sheets of fabric up like high
vertically and then dous them with water and then that's whated like kind of capture the gas in the fabric so you can
actually breathe around there which yeah it doesn't seem that hard it's a solution yeah I mean that's something
that they have in their homes right right exactly they could could done something yeah think about you can just
wrap that around your face right like you just wrap I think a water around your face I mean I think you may waterboarding yourself but otherwise it
should work yeah one distinction of B Paul is
that it is also one of the most densely packed cities in the most densely packed uh country in the world the shanty town
the these were just workers around the factory like they were just like you just wake up I mean the town literally
was built around this thing it was like the factory was kind of like the central nucleus of the entire city which is why
it had such dramatic impact because if it leaves a factory the only place it has to go and settle is this this Tiny
Town that's that's right beneath it as people start kind of dropping so
to do the animals so basically it turns into a zombie hellscape so like all their life suck is dead all every animal
around them is falling down apparently it's turning some of the leaves on the trees black like it looks like hell on
Earth is what the eyewitness survival statements of this have been about what what it looked
like and there's a lot of difference of opinion in terms of the death count so
some sorts has put the death count somewhere around 2200 people like that night others put it closer to 5,000 so
it's somewhere in that range I've also seen 3600 so it's somewhere in the 2 to 5,000 person range like that initial
first night in addition to that roughly 41,000 people became severely severely
disabled like people needing life support for the rest of their lives or L um organ transplants and stuff like that
oh and then nearly 600,000 574 th000 people were injured um as a result of
this so they had to see medical attention it was it was the entire town like it was literally the entire
town There's a photo you should find that is haunting and terrifying and it
was taken on is the baby yeah did you see it already I saw it just the baby's
face in the dirt yeah yeah yeah so that picture was taken by a pretty well
renowned famous photographer called Ragu Ray and he they were basically putting together
Mass burning pits to like destroy the bodies because there were so many bodies available like the system had there was
no infrastructure for something like this and this guy took this picture that ended up becoming basically the image
that was the face of the B paa disaster what did you search you search Bal I just yeah Bal disaster and it's
like the first thing that comes up is a poor baby yeah yeah so you know the way
that with alitz it's always like the train tracks that show The White gate like that is this is that picture became
the endemic picture and nobody knows who that baby is usually the entire families were dead so a lot of the iwitness right
it's whole family is probably dead yeah it was it was like it' be like a kid who
has like seven siblings and two parents and he just woke up and the whole family was dead for some reason it didn't affect so so nobody knows who the kid
was um the Atlantic also released this awesome photo opet of what happened this
was in 2014 it was called Bal the world's worst industrial disaster 30
years later it is totally worth Googling you can get pictures of what it looked like back then you get pictures of what it looks like now it looks terrifying
right now it looks like this plant is just like this weird abandoned it looks haunted the whole place looks [ __ ]
haunted which it probably is so all this goes down and people are obviously very very upset Union Carbide
mostly tries to absolve itself of any blame they held to this Theory called
the uh worker sabotage theory of what ended up happening they claimed that it
was nearly impossible for water to enter the tank without someone actually forcing the water into the tank and
their argument is that some random worker decided to kill off the town and hook the water line to the side of the
tank that's that's their argument yeah so right now realistically
we actually don't even know what ended up causing this we know that the plant was very poorly maintained and we also
know that the government of India basically shut off access to the plant and conducted their own investigation so
nobody actually got to investigate what was going on outside of the government itself and the government was the one
that's also suing Union Carbide for billions and billions of dollars over what they ended up costing so the
government's take on this was that there were workers who were about 400 feet away trying to unclog a pipe somewhere
and they were using Force induction water to clear that pipe and they weren't using what's called a slipped
line plate which prevents water from leaking outside that pipe and then water from that ended up getting inside this
tank they there's also like an obvious cultural bias here so apparently very
few of the plant operators understood English but all these safety equipment safety manuals and the writings on them
the warnings on them were all written in English and so nobody actually could read any of this stuff which is like an
obvious bad unb I know so simple again so many of these things have to
up yeah so in addition to this uh there were also other safety precautions that
were there but not operational the time so for example uh most of these plants like this have what's called a flare
Tower which is basically what it sounds like it is a high tower with a flame at the end of it and so if gas is escaping
from one of these tanks it's supposed to be routed up this flare Tower and then it gets burned off before it can be released into the atmosphere but in this
case seen those in like I I see those yeah yeah it's um so anytime like the
flame yeah at the very end yeah it's like usually you would see it with like an oil Derek for example yeah yeah yeah
so but in this case that uh flare Tower had been in operational for about five months could not work did not work five
months again a million things adding up yeah it was this is another insane one
so it was later discovered that all these tanks had Refrigeration units because again there's several things
that have to come together this to happen so one it has to there has to be a certain temperature it has to have a
conductive Force introduced to it in this case water like somebody didn't release release the pressure valve on
there was aund things that had to come happen so there's aund things that they do ahead of time to prevent this happening one of those was refrigerating
the units so all these units individually have refrigeration units attached to them to keep them at a steady temperature in this case it would
have been 4 and half degrees C in this case the refrigeration unit was broken so it wasn't working so it was actually
the at ambient temperature which was 20° Celsius at the time and also this was
outlined in the manuals but the manuals were't in English so nobody knew God so Union Carbide was later on
sold to down chemicals I'm going to get into a lot more detail here but for the time being just know that they were sold to down chemicals they actually still
maintain a website that is just about ball and I went to it I looked it up it
was really really interesting I've never seen like a corporate here's our take on this event
that like we're not responsible for at this point anymore because it's been like 40 years now and we've been sold
off to two different companies so like they still they're still maintaining their innocence and what they talk about on their on their website is they leaned
heavily on that worker sabotage Theory so it's it's interesting because I look
at the circumstances this whole environmental racism thing I look look at where they set this plant up I look at how they treated their workers I look
at how everything was in a state of deterioration and breakdown and nobody gave a [ __ ] cuz they're like [ __ ] these
people if they die they die it doesn't really matter all this stuff and it's just obvious like you you were the
responsible party and you did this but when you look at this worker sabotage Theory it kind of makes sense
like I feel like maybe those things can all be true you can be awful and shitty and evil and also you didn't do like
this so yes one of the things was again none of these safety things
were were in in effect but the very root cause of this was water going into the tank that started the chemical reaction
and then everything [ __ ] up before that every Everything [ __ ] up after that but how did the water get into a sealed tank that was specifically
designed to not let water absorb into it so right one report stated that for
water from the workers cleaning that clog pipe 400t away to have entered the tank the water would have had to have
reached the height of 10 F feet before it could have got and it was impossible it was in an open space it never would
have gotten to 10 feet high and so they were like it doesn't make any sense how water could have gotten into this thing in addition to that there was this guy
who was the plant operations manager who was responsible for the manufacturer of mic and in 2017 there was like another
court case there's so many court cases like I'm going to blow past court cases later on because I'm like you we'll all
just not off to sleep driving and listening to this if I don't but in 2017 there was a cord case and this guy who
was a Productions manager for the first time came out and said this was not this was not an accident that somebody physically did this he actually named a
guy that he think did this and you know on one part I'm like well you were the
plant operations manager responsible production of this stuff so like you have an incentive to say this wasn't
done this didn't happen accidentally somebody deliberately did this but also it's 2017 so like why what if you're
going to lie why do it now presumably this guy's like 80 years old like why like so a part of thinks like maybe it's
true I don't know yeah because nobody can definitively say
how water got into the tank that's all we know we do know that the day wait has anyone I'm sorry has anyone been able to
look at the tank yeah yeah but that's the thing not just like the government no just the government has so that's
what you saying that's suspicious question yeah yeah they're they're saying that that like let us investigate
this thing like it's our plan we would know better than you would and they were completely cut out of the investigation
by the government it's worth noting the government also owned 22% of this company and so they also have an
incentive to say it was all this third party because they don't want to pay out pay out the
victims 100% yeah that checks out as BS
right so un and carbide came out initially with a $350 million settlement
offer and to set up a victims fund they said that if they did it this way they would essentially um earn interest over
the term of 20 years so the tune of $600 million then they could settle all liability claims um for the disaster and
care for the victims the government of India said no [ __ ] this we're not going to accept that offer we want 3.3 billion
which Union carb obviously turn down because that was more or less their market cap at the
time right so part of India's reason for um
for why they were I mean the disparity the 10x disparity in the dollar figure
was how bad this event actually was so as I mentioned livestock fla fauna
everything was basically contaminated or if it wasn't contaminated was already dead so in addition to that the people
who survived and were still in that area they couldn't use the land they couldn't fish because they thought the fish
contained mic they couldn't um eat the livestock they thought that had mic and
so as a result of this they're also dealing with a massive massive food food shortage
and because nobody had contemplated a disaster of this scale and size I mean
think about like 600,000 people show up your door one day and they like we all
need medical attention the most severe case possible nobody was equipped for this and so as a result they also had to
build these makeshift hospitals they had to bring in doctors that were basically like like low tier doctors the worst of
the worst because they there was enough doctors to go around the entire city or the entire country is the actual cost to
India's government was tremendous because they also had to figure out how to rehome these people
half million of them who could no longer lose this part of the country it was all yeah
terrible so ultimately two parties settled on I think is like a pretty
modest amount of money it was $470 million plus 17 million to basically
fund a hospital dedicated to just treating these victims so pretty light
like Just sh have half a billion I think MH and at the same time as the civil
cases going on there's also several criminal cases going on so the CEO of Union Carbide is a guy name or was a guy
he died in 2014 was a guy named Warren Anderson and he's like the quintessential Gordon gecko like when I
looked at his pictures I was like man like you just look like you killed a bunch of 80s brown people like
yeah and he was charged with manslaughter by the government of India
and an ex extradition request was sent to the United States which the US was like we're not doing this we're not
going to send this guy to go to jail in India um so ultimately only seven people
who worked at in Union carai were charged and fac any actual tangible consequences and these were just the
Indian guys these are the Indian the executives in India yeah like they were the only ones they get a hold of I mean
I'm sure if you're living in Bal and you're an executive you're you're probably not like a Warren Anderson
who's like probably got like seven homes in the Hamptons so these guys ended up getting a negligent homicide charge they
fac two years sentences which they were actually paroled almost immediately um and they each received a $2,800 fine for
what they did or didn't do wow it's interesting because today
women in that area when they're lactating mic is still found in their
breast milk like it is oh my God it is a absolute
hellscape even to this day and Wow since all this ended up happening obviously
the Factor's been shut down that tank hasn't been destroyed it's still kind of sitting there recently I think it was
like 2016 2017 some investigator reporter basically all these people who
still live in this area are like this thing is still poisoning us like there's still chemicals here they're leaking out of these tanks that have not been
operational for 40 years they're in the groundwater and this one investiga reporter went there to kind of
investigate the spot I can't imagine how [ __ ] terrifying this had to be like I I hope this guy makes a million dollars
on his reporting because the thought of just going here and walking around it you've seen pictures of it right it
looks absolutely nightmarish yeah oh my God yeah so he
was trying to investigate if there actually is still chemicals there that are being leaked into the ground he
ended up getting crazy sick like he had to be hospitals hospitalized in the ICU just by walking around this place so it
is still doing something it is it's still there it's still leeching poison into the ground for these poor people
and it presumably always will it's been completely completely abandoned the company itself like I mentioned was sold
off the down chemicals it is not operating in the batall anymore so that's the latest and great right so the
people there like d have any jobs anymore there's nothing the the the the financial impact of all this you lose
your family you lose your home you lose your animals you lose your [ __ ] vegetation like you can't drink the
water like it is I don't even know how they survive yeah a lot of these folks barely
do yeah a lot I mean they're barely surviving anyways a lot of these folks ended up moving to other parts of India but there's still a city there like
there's still people that live there it's still a I'm not going to say thriving Metropolis but it's still a metropolis in some ways but it's like
you're just living there with the fact that 30 tons of your everything around you is contaminated with this [ __ ] it
doesn't go away it also doesn't go away like it's like nuclear radiation just kind of sticks
around totally uh that's terrible but the reason I kept bringing
up the documentary is like I was trying to paint a picture of what this city looked like it's like every it's not their fault I mean like
you can't blame people for being poor but it's it just looks like a hellscape like it just looks like hell on Earth
and then you add into the fact that like all the city is now poisoned and
it's just and your animals are all dead it's just like the whole thing is just such a nightmarish picture and think about it it happened like 1:00 in the
morning so like you're in bed and all of a sudden you can't breathe your eyes are burning in your nose is like turning
blood red and like people could have just died and not even noticed no I
don't think so it sounds like a you woke up yeah got it yeah because because this
reminds me a lot of um of chin poisoning have you heard about chin poisoning at all uhuh so when chin is vaporized and
you breathe it it does to your eyes it it does to everything inside of you what
like the small doses you get if you open your eyes under under water in a pool do it just basically incinerates your
insides like it just flames you from the inside out it's a horrible way to die it's one of the worst ways to die know
to man and that's also what this was essentially so no I you would know you
would know you die relatively quickly but but you're dying of hemorrhaging inside of you and so bleeding out isn't
going to be a fast process yeah uh it's terrible there's a
great chlorine story I read it like forever ago and it was like this couple somewhere in the middle of nowhere Texas
nobody was around them and this train transporting a bunch of chlorine
derailed and it vaporized the chlorine and then it just like was around this
couple's house and they couldn't leave and they had to like sit there and I think they both died but I I'll research
that and do an update but it's crazy crazy God terrible yeah well didn't wean some of
those things happen recently wasn't there that train in Ohio that had all that like gas yeah I think that was
coring too oh might yeah it's really bad it's really really bad stuff so and also
there's like this element of like industrial to it of like it's just I
don't know there's an environmental racism piece of it the greed is good piece of it the fact that it's just all
bad just all it's like the worst parts of human nature kind of colliding in creating this situation and also the
name is terrifying Union Carbide is coming to town to build a factory it's like get the [ __ ] out of here with that
absolutely not you fing movie villains get out of town with Warren Anderson
with his amazing hair oh wait let me Google him he does have amazing hair he looks like a CEO like this guy was born
to be the CEO of a company that kills a bunch of brown people oh I see him
yeah than a Gordon gecko but I think yeah he was named after um Warren G
Hardy nice yeah um he lived to B92 and died in
Florida in a nursing home in Vero
Beach always yeah any who that is my story it is
again the the Doom to fail part being water and mic if you have mic and you're
storing it in your backyard do not introduce water to it because it will cause a chemical reaction it will kill your whole
town yeah be careful with that with that don't I mean live next to a chemical plant but
like I don't know get a canary stop doing chemistry in your backyard
chemical that's 100% I saw like a thing that that was like a house in I don't know like poo
Alto that was like really expensive but it was a total te down cuz it used to be a meth lab you could go into it why
can't you go into a meth lab because you'll die because it's full of meth chemicals are those bad for
you yes were you're supposed to smoke it yes but it's like made in a lab like
so if you if you have a meth lab in your house your house is contaminated oh [ __ ] yeah yeah I
remember what's this face had that um what's his name David David Shapiro no
um David Shakespeare no uh the the wake up Guy what's his name David David
Branch Branch crash yes CR had a meth lab well when they
moved into the mount carel compound they reported a meth flb in there so the
police had to come out and clear it and sanitize it got it yeah that's what I'm think it's bad for you um I made an absolutely
horrifying photo on Mid Journey while you were talking and I don't think I'm going to post it because it's terrible but you want to see it yeah always
um okay wait how do I this is you're GNA be just hold hold
on to your butts oh my God what did you search I just wrote bowal disaster and
the other ones are kind of tame but this one's awful it's like a child surrounded by skeletons that are standing up it's
very scary it's like very scary
imagine we're not talking just silence this is a silent stop sharing this is a
s portion of the podcast um yeah there you go there you have it thank you
fars I'm excited to hear more about um the
um more engineering disasters more to come I I added gas disaster to my my mid
Journey let's see what that produces uh it's more the same I mean
these images are haunting but they're also not that far off from like what I picture in my mind when I think of like
this event yeah totally I mean like there are like literal pictures of like people walking through the town and the animals are all
dead and then there's pictures of dead people everywhere yeah not good so we won't be posting all those but they'll
exist damn that one's freaky um cool well is there anything you want to read
out to before we cut off um yeah we had a couple uh Instagram messages um our
friend September and my cousin Lindsay sent some things ideas for you that I'll send to you and then um our friend
Andrea said yes she agrees that third parties are ridiculous for presidential
elections but it wouldn't be a problem if we use rank Choice voting so something to think about uh second that
is the ideal way to do it is rank choice but we would yeah anything that improves
so here's the thing my general thesis is that anything that would increase voter
outcomes and are less likely to be diluted by other people's interests in those
outcomes isn't going to happen and ran Choice voting is one of those things yeah and I think it's a certain
specific people who are making that happen right um so right not me but it's
out there um like just this week I didn't do it what no no we didn't
do it I mean like just this week there was like a county where um the predominantly black areas kep running
out of ballots yeah and them like a 100 ballots a day a good hour you're like
what it's so obvious what you're doing so obvious mind but you know America
anyway yeah that's it so thank you Andrea and Lindsay in September and um if anyone has any other ideas or
thoughts please let us know we're on Instagram at doom tood and then at gmail Doom tood gmail.com perfect awesome
we'll go ahead and cut this off
oh