The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #84383 Message #1560470
Posted By: pdq
10-Sep-05 - 11:59 AM
Thread Name: BS: So Where will The Next Disaster Hit?
Subject: RE: BS: So Where will The Next Disaster Hit?
A Blind Spot for Bad Guys
by Peter M. Sandman
Posted: June 15, 2005
The most serious industrial accident in history — some 2,000 dead, up to 300,000 injured — probably wasn't an accident. There is no definitive proof the December 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, was caused by sabotage; certainly no disaffected employee has ever been charged with the crime. But as the company argued for years, what happened at Carbide's factory was either a really weird confluence of independent human errors and equipment malfunctions (and maybe some money-saving corner-cutting) or pretty much what a well-trained worker would do if s/he wanted to ruin a batch of methyl isocyanate in the most dramatic fashion possible. In logic, the likeliest explanation is the one that requires the fewest assumptions, and in the case of Bhopal that's sabotage.
Whatever the truth about Bhopal, what's interesting is the nearly universal rejection of Carbide's sabotage hypothesis. A Google search today for "Bhopal Carbide accident" yields 41,100 hits, compared to only 18,200 for "Bhopal Carbide sabotage." From the outset, journalists and the public found two scenarios believable: that Bhopal was simply an accident or that it was a stunning example of corporate malfeasance. Nobody did it or Carbide did it. The possibility that a bad guy did it ran a very distant third.
Of course Union Carbide's management didn't help matters by implying that if an angry employee or former employee was responsible, then the company wasn't — as if companies were under no particular obligation to keep their factories from being used as weapons of mass destruction. Since Carbide seemed to think that sabotage would let the company off the hook, activists (and plaintiffs' attorneys) felt obliged to say it couldn't possibly be sabotage. And just about everybody found that easy to accept.
When Outrage Is a Hazard
It isn't just activists, journalists, and the public that tend to ignore the bad guy scenario. Companies do too. In my presentations to corporate environment, health, and safety (EH&S) groups, I often ask how many people have heard that the Bhopal disaster might have been sabotage. I get a smattering of hands. And when I ask what priority EH&S management is giving to sabotage prevention, I get mostly blank stares. In 1995 I published a short article on this topic in The Synergist, the monthly journal of the American Industrial...
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