From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nola.
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control decad. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Tonight's tale is taking us across the world to the nation of India, and on the way, we want to give a big thanks to our fellow conspiracy realist people like Maya M and Sean C who took the time to reach out to us about this topic.
We're exploring a tragic, twisted tale of corruption, crime, chemicals, and, according to some, the greatest industrial accident in human history. It's a story that was largely unfamiliar to a lot of people in the West. Here are the facts. Have you guys ever heard of Beaupaul Bhopl.
Just to hear the name, very little knowledge of its geography, as is often the case with me in geographical location. Yeah.
With regards to this disaster that's really, at least in the West. The major reason it's even written about or spoken about.
I was not familiar with this disaster at all, and boy was I educated.
Yeah, we're not going to spend too too much time on the facts because the story itself is factual and so crazy. So just for a bit of background here, bopol Is Boupaul is the capital city of an Indian state, Madhya Pradesh. And if you look at this city on the map app, you'll see its smack dab in the middle of the country in central India, surrounded by natural artificial lakes alike. It is the sixteenth largest city in the nation of India and it's the one hundred and
thirty first largest in the world. It's a big, big place.
Oh man. Remember when we were hanging out with our buddy Mangesh in New York over the weekend. He was talking about he had a relative who is the head of forestry for the entire country of India, and we asked, you know what, wow, is that in like urban centers or mainly kind of more out in the sticks. And it's definitely out more in areas like this where you're going to have these very dense, kind of forested regions.
Yeah, you know, and we can identify with that because here in our fair metropolis of Atlanta, we live in a place that is sometimes called the city in a forest. Atlanta has an enormous expanse ofage. It's a green city in that regard, and that's kind of the story with this city. It has its own history dating back millennia. According to the legends, it's named after an ancient king,
Raja Bojah. And if you look at the etymology, the paul in the name Beaupaul means something like reservoir or dam, so we could translate the name of this city to the city of the King Raja Boja or the city of lakes. That's awesome, yeah, and it probably was for quite some time. I mean, it's a beautiful place, you know. It's it's also almost paradoxically, it's home to a lot
of industry. There are pharmaceutical manufacturers there, the automotive industry has a presence, as well as textiles manufacturers of electronic goods. But as heartbreaking as it is to admit, Bopaul isn't best known for its ancient history or it's beguiling attractions, Nords, greenery, nords, healthier industry. Instead, the city has become synonymous with disaster. Here's where it gets crazy. Sorry, folks, heads up told you we were getting to that early.
Yeah, I may as well just rip the band aid off.
Right, So this disaster begins on December third, nineteen eighty four. As we were recording this in December this year, it will have been what, guys, forty years since this disaster. Let's describe the disaster.
What happened so shortly after midnight on December third, nineteen eighty four in the neighborhood of forty tons of dangerous methyl iso cyanate or MIC, a very lethal gas, escaped from an insecticide plant that was owned and operated by an Indian subsidiary of the American firm Union in Carbide Corporation.
This division was done as Union Carbide India Limited, which was huge at this time, and the company itself was actually founded back in nineteen seventy one of those legacy kind of chemical interests, right, and the Indian subsidiary was the very first petrochemical producer in the entirety of India, as you know, as you mentioned Ben since that point, a lot more have joined the party. They made all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, yeah, they chemically stuff, mainly right, chemical products, plastic goods, photographic plates, films, industrial electrodes, laminated glass, machine tools, all kinds of things. And they also, unfortunately had a long standing shoddy track record when it came to safety.
Shoddy, I think is understating it.
Yeah, yeah, I mean calling it a track record is probably understating it.
Yeah.
But from nineteen eighty to nineteen eighty four alone, just in those four years leading up to the disaster, more than sixty seven different leakages of this substance methyl isocyanate or MC occurred, and management made sure to downplay these reports when they were asked by the public or the press, or indeed the Indian government. They said, look, you know, accidents happened. None of these events are a real threat
to health. And even when something does go sideways, it never exceeds the legal standards for toxic emissions in the air.
Yeah. Well, and let's talk about these chemicals where they were stored. At this location, they had these huge storage tanks. There were three stories high, guys, three stories worth of this deadly toxic chemical that they, you know, would would take out just little bits at a time for the manufacturing process to make the products they were making. But they just kept that stuff just sitting there. It's so volatile.
If it interacts with water at all, you will get explosive literally explosive chemical reaction results.
Yeah, we should also mention that they have been doing this since nineteen sixty nine, so they were around for decades.
Yeah.
Well, and well, I'm sure we'll get into it. But it wasn't just this one chemical. They had all kinds of chemicals that were just stored on site, a lot of times improperly. Other times they had them in these evaporation ponds where they're just sitting there and leeching into
the water supplies that's around the area. It's so weird because it is the company, right, Union Carbide, but it's also this specific site because they run a bunch of different Union Carbide factories and places like this, but this one in particular, it just seems that the safety was superlax.
Yeah, and Union Carbide India Limited was at the time of this operation. The actual company, the US based Union Carbide owned a little bit more like a smidge more than fifty percent of United Carbide India and the other forty nine point something percent. Forty nine point one percent is owned by Indian investors, some of whom are individuals, some of whom are factions of the government. So there's a lot of There are a lot of stakeholders, we
should say, and they're printing money making these products. So it is unfortunately no surprise that workers and activists who would repeatedly raise concern about these problems were roundly ignored. Perhaps in some cases they found themselves to be victims of retaliation because miic is not something you sell to the public. The public is never supposed to touch this. It's
what's called an intermediary chemical in pesticide production. And longtime listeners, as you all know, pesticide is its own bag of badgers as far as health effects go. But even back in the nineteen eighties, even before the nineteen eighties, everybody who was read up on mic knew it was nasty, nasty stuff.
Yeah again, just let's let's say one more time. Methyl isocyanate isociety, the cionate part.
It should be a tip. It's probably not great. I can only assume it's related to cyanide or maybe that's just me and my etymological year.
I don't think you're wrong.
No, okay, Well, methyl is also something that we don't love to see.
Put together double not good, double one plus whatever the one is from the thing from nineteen eighty four. Yeah plus un good?
Yes, there it is. So this leak results in a gas that drifts out of the plant and envelops densely populated neighborhoods in the.
Area and poisoned fog.
Yes, just so, and it kills Like World War One mustard gas warfare. This stuff kills thousands of people immediately, and then it creates a panic because people who don't immediately die, tens of thousands of other people are attempting to flee the city en mass.
Well, let's talk about what happened. Something pretty standard there was, at least according to the official story. There was a worker who was flushing water through one of the systems, and it was a pipe, a long pipe series that was I guess rusted and corroding a bit, and somehow the water that he was flushing through that system entered into one of these storage tanks. Again, according to the story, there were pieces of the equipment that malfunctioned that allowed
that water to shoot off into the storage tank. But immediately upon that water hitting it, it's set off that chain chemical reaction and the it exploded. One of those storage tanks exploded, and that's where all of those chemicals just started leaking out and then hugging the ground like some kind of I'd like a horror move, like a zombie bribe. You'll see where there's a mist on the ground or something that's you know, in this case, it's above a human head, but it's just floating.
Outwards, like the fog or the mist. Other horror stories that would be comparable. This is real life. The final death toll is estimated to be somewhere between fifteen thousand to twenty thousand people. But there's something tricky about that because that quote unquote final death toll only counts the people who died immediately in the first few days. The actual number, the actual toll in blood is much higher.
And also, oh, we didn't even mention this. As this gas is drifting over these populated neighborhoods at the same time, communication lines with the larger nation of India have have gone caput. They shut down, so when the accident occurs, but Paul itself is cut off from civilization.
Does this feel a little Chernobyl asked to you guys, one hundred percent. Yeah, just in terms of the community, I mean all of it, but like the communication part was key. That was I guess more perpetrated by the Soviet government at the time in terms of siloing information and not telling the rest of the world. But I'm sensing a theme.
And they show up later in tonight's show The Soviets, so if you're wondering how they play a role, you'll seum don't worry. Spoiler also want to give a special
shout out since you mentioned Chernobyl. There is an excellent four part series on Netflix now called The Railwaymen, The Untold Story of Bopaul in nineteen eighty four, and do check that out especially, you know, I don't want to say enjoyed, but if you found chernobyl the series fascinating, then you'll see a lot of thematic unfortunate similarities in The Railwaymen.
Yeah. I think one of the differences. Well, you tell me, guys, I don't know that much about Chernobyl. But in this case, this facility, this factory was supposed to have at least six alarm systems and alert systems that would be triggered if any of their chemicals were released, and at least to everything I've seen, that none of those systems functioned.
Also, I would note thattt that the factory was not supposed to be located where it was in the first place. It's because what we say it deployed in nineteen sixty nine, being as close to densely populated areas as it was, was a violation of a later thing called the Beaupual develop Plan from seventy five.
Well, just because of how fast the gas could travel, right if if it caught wind and just started expelling from the facility, And well but even then, if there was any kind of system involved, they even just set off a siren right the way like you might hear a tornado siren in your.
Town or something good old lasim just.
To alert that, oh, something's wrong, right, But in this case, nobody had any idea anything was wrong.
No, especially given the late hour of the incident. Something like half a million survivors suffered respiratory problems, continue to suffer these today, ie irritation, straight up blindness, other maladies, especially cancer, and it's all from exposure to this toxic gas. Eventually, survivors, many of them, received monetary compensation, but it's peanuts in comparison to what's happened to them. It's something like the equivalent of three high hundred and ten dollars US per person.
And this, you know, we also know that forty thousand individuals of the five hundred thousand believed to be exposed are permanently disabled or maimed as a result of this. It is enormously difficult to articulate the magnitude of this calamity, and that's why it remains, even now in twenty twenty four, remains considered the worst industrial accident in all of human history. And you know, we're throwing numbers out, we're talking a
little bit about chemistry, we're talking about zoning. Weirdly enough, maybe the best way to convey the impact of this hellish situation is to look directly at the stories of survivors. And with this I suggest we go to an excellent MPR piece from November of last year.
Absolutely a journalist retoo Shotterjy tells the story of Rihanna b who was just sixteen years old when this catastrophe took place, and she and her family lived in a neighborhood near the plant. She her three brothers, her father, and her mother, who was eight months pregnant at the time, all were living there together, and like most of the folks in the neighborhood, her family all were asleep at the time of the incident, and the neighbors came and
woke the family up. When Bee's parents opened the door, they were understandably very startled and shaken by what they saw.
Yeah. Yeah, they walk out, and all of their neighbors are running around outside or looking around in confusion because the majority of people had just woken up. Suddenly they're coughing, cough, cough. They're rubbing their eyes, and their eyes and their lungs are burning with whatever this substance is in the air.
And these people know there is a factory, but they don't know what I see is No one knew what was happening, none of the civilians unless they were directly working at the plant, and so B notes it was quote as if someone was burning chili's meaning chili pepper. If you've ever had chili pepper pepper spray, yeah, yeah.
Not healing as it inhaling. It is one of the worst things. Sometimes when I'm just cleaning off the dishes and I've got hot water hitting you know, the ghost peppers that i was just eating, I'm like, when it gets aerosolized, it's not a fun time. And in this case we're talking about it's the miic, right, but it's also hydrogen cyanide and monomethylamine, which are two other crazy
dangerous chemicals that are making the oil burning. The oil burning lamps that are outside burn brown because of the substances that are getting into the flame.
It looks like an evil spell. And also I know there were a lot of people nodding, probably in unfortunate sympathy, with the idea of burning ChIL.
In the air.
I want to give a shout out to my cousin, one of my cousins who doesn't listen to the show, thankfully, because he showed me the dangers of chili's When he was cutting some and I think being lazy, he scratched himself and he touched his eyes and while.
Recover scratched himself in a middle gentleman.
Yeah, I got him.
I got him bad.
And so back to the wee hours of nineteen eighty four, December third, Bee's family, Rihanna Bee's family is trying to flee this gas, but the problem is everyone else is attempting to flee as well, and her mother, again is eight months pregnant. So with all the crowds, the chaos, the pandemonium, and her mother's vulnerable condition, the family elects to sit on the side of a nearby road and
try to wake things out until the morning. And you've seen this pretty often if you've ever or if you've ever been in an area where a natural disaster is occurring, you see something similar. Like when people try to exit the path of a hurricane on the interstate. The inner states can be choked and they can become unusable. So this is what we're seeing happen here as a pedestrian
version of that. And sadly, look, this is incredibly disturbing, folks, But sadly, in the case of Be's family alone, not everybody made it. By the end of the day, Both of her parents and one of her brothers, a younger when three years old, they had all died. They joined the thousands of victims who fell to the gas.
Yeah, and just imagine there are thousands of people around you in that moment, if you are going through this, they are choking to death, they're vomiting themselves to death. They are it is I think you described it as hell That is probably what it looked and felt like in that moment.
I'm sorry to keep being that guy that's like in this movie or tvach or whatever, but there. I recently saw the new spin off of The Walking Dead and
there's a really I'd never seen it depicted. Like there's a really intense scene where there's a chemical attack, like a mustard gas type attack, and it was really done with such intensity and ferocity and people are like, you know, throwing up white stuff and their eyes are running, and you know a lot of people just die, but some people escape, but they their lungs are damaged for like
months and they have to recover. And it was just I mean, I know it's a TV show, but I'd never really seen this depicted in that way before, and I found it really, you know, hard to watch.
Yeah, it's I do think hellish is the appropriate word because gas has been deployed in warfare, and this is very similar to that. However, often in the case of biological warfare or chemical warfare, excuse me, these soldiers going into those situations will ideally be armed with some kind of protective gear. You know, we'll check out our episode on PB pills to see how that preventative measure can
go wrong. But the most disturbing thing, and perhaps not appropriate for all of us in the audience this evening, is this just to drive the impact home. Rahana B vividly recalls in her interview with MPR how some of her relatives witnessed the eight month old fetus in her mother's womb, moving and struggling to survive until the next morning, long after the mother had passed. And this is one yeah, this is one story of thousands and thousands of people.
And now Rona B has survived, you know, she started a family of her own, but she is haunted by the lifelong consequences the shadow of this mic stuff. She has high blood pressure and diabetes. In particular, her husband that she married a year after the disaster also has chronic health conditions. And these conditions are so serious that they prevented the couple from working, so they depend on their two sons for income. Their lives have been irreparably altered.
And the worst part is this is so far from unique. Multiple studies over intervening decades have proven that survivors of this incident have a range of chronic health issues, real serious stuff, not like oh my knee aches a little when the weather's changing. We're talking about enormously higher rates of cancer. This is a real conspiracy.
Well, we're also talking about like brain damage and birth defect issues, breast milk that has been contaminated. I saw in the a Guardian article that was mostly in twenty twenty three, written by Judah Passau and tim edwards where there was a person quoted in there who survived it saying the lucky ones were taken that day. We are
unlucky for surviving. And that's just talking about to everyone that they lost individually, you know, in that moment and the following days, and all the people who have been injured by you know, as the long term effects of this thing, and just having to suffer through all of that. It's just horrifying, right right. So again, these.
Claims are backed up by science, as always say, multiple studies have proven this, and with all this hard evidence about the consequences, it should come as no surprise that India, the survivors of the incident, and indeed the world entire we're asking themselves, and still are asking themselves what happened. We're going to take a break for a word from our sponsors, and then we're going to get into that question. And spoilers ahead, folks. It gets into some deep water
pretty quickly. We have returned what happened? This is the biggest question I've mentioned earlier. You could watch a fictionalized, in depth exploration of the incident in the Netflix series The Railwaymen. It's similar to the earlier series on Chernobyl. I see we start with the immediate blowback, and then we get to the theories we've already kind of established. There were long standing issues at the chemical factory. Issues the workers had flagged time and time again, but we
didn't say some of them. But let's get a little more specific. The workers realized that gas pressure detectors, pipes different air scrut like air fence scrubbers, and even their own training wasn't adequate. If something went wrong, and things were malfunctioning on a regular basis, including the safety alerts.
And basic valves right that open and close pie pipes were malfunctioning on a regular basis, which is something you think, okay, that's wear and tear right and a factory, your valves, your pipes are going to need to get replaced over time. But if your primary things that close off dangerous chemicals from being either released or combined with other dangerous chemicals aren't working, you've got a serious problem.
Yeah, in retrospect, indeed, this was a when, not an if situation. It was an accident waiting to happen, and then in the immediate aftermath, Union Carbide, through its Indian subsidiary, tries to disassociate itself from any legal responsibility. It leads to differing perspectives of the company, the state of India, and the public. It's a divide that continues today. Union Carbide floated a theory that we'll get to at a moment.
But if we look at the scholarship, there's a great in depth report you can read for free online today called The Beau Paul Saga. The author Ingrid Eckerman from Scandinavia delves into four the four mean theories of what caused the disaster, and some of them are more plausible than others. There are a couple are just very difficult to prove, to be honest with you, that's right. And first we have what's known as the water washing theory,
which came from the workers. The argument being made that management of the plant during this time in December were not familiar with established maintenance protocols and they didn't know that leaks could occur even after a production was halted. And I guess this kind of fits in Ben, who you were talking.
About, how this had happened before or there were numerous instances of this type of leakage, so clearly, I don't know how many times the personnel shifted. I would imagine maybe there might have been a lot to turnover in a situation like this, But that is the theory that they the new bosses, didn't know what to do and just weren't educated, which I don't know. It seems to track to me, yeah.
Quite possibly, right, Like if they weren't read up on the maintenance and the safety protocols, then they may have made dangerous assumptions like saying, Hey, a leak can't happen because we've stopped the machine, We've halted production, you know what I mean.
But it's being held in a thing, in a pressurized tank. I mean leaks. Of course, it could happen your house leaks even if you're not running the shower, you know, I mean, it comes from any number of places. That's absurd, right.
And yeah, even like think of a garden hose in a backyard. Even if you turn off the faucet, there's still water in the hose, that's right. So Eckerman goes in depth about some of the issues, writing that a supervisor from the day shift left instructions on flushing the pipes leading from those enormous three story tanks to the vent gas scrubber, so flush this out with water. But he forgot to mention a specific thing, something called slip binds that have to be placed on each end of
the pipes. And so when the worker comes in to try to try to follow through with these tasks, they use these things called stopcocks, and they weren't sure whether they had been able to tighten everything to the level it needed to be. And that was due to corrosion and rust. Because we talked about wear and tear. What's happening is these things haven't been replaced in quite some time, so the water doesn't come out the way the worker is expecting to, and he finds that those filters are
blocked with metal debris. He cuts off the water. The supervisor says, clean the filters, and then when he turns the water back on, it's only coming out of three of the four drains, and so the supervisor tells him to just keep the water running and the night shift will turn it off.
And the idea is we're flushing, we're cleaning out this stuff, and potentially we're breaking through whatever blockage there is in that fourth one that's not functioning exactly.
Yeah, we can keep it going, we can wear down the blockage, and then things will continue to function per normal, meaning with repeated malfunctions that are roundly ignored.
It's a bit weird because it in this version. I guess it is the supervisor, right, It's like, oh man, the supervisor didn't know what the supervisor was supposed to do and what the process is. Where it's it's his fault. There is a worker who does ultimately clean the filters and turn on the water. The water that then, if this theory is correct, then goes in and causes the explosion.
But again, it's like placing blame. It's like you'd be placing blame on It gets a little weird because ultimately it feels like Union Carbide is respon, right, the company that owns the factory. So no matter who at the factory caused an accident or disaster or tragedy like this, it's it's company's fault. But we'll get into that. But let's see, because there's another theory with the water too, right, Yeah.
That's correct. There's the direct entry theory. This is the idea that the runaway chain reaction in the tank that resulted in the gas leak came about because of the introduction of a substantial amount of water. This is another theory or allegation placing the blame squarely on the workers.
Right.
In other words, what they're saying is someone accidentally or deliberately pumped water into the tank, So it's an argument for either incompetence or sabotage. The workers and their representatives, of course, object to this because from their perspective, they're the people who have for more than a decade been saying, hey, if something goes wrong, we are in trouble because we're not doing the right maintenance, please help us bosses. And the bosses said, no, well, those.
Are the folks usually hear that kind of stuff with when there's in common sense at upper levels the people who are in the trenches and really actually operate the machinery and are working the line. You know, it's not the suits up in the offices because they don't touch the stuff. It's all in theory for them.
The person who pulled the lever, rather than the group of people that went down the chain that told that person to pull the lever.
Right, or the people who designed the lever that doesn't work.
Yeah, there you go. There you go. And just for our purposes here, NPR and the Guardian and several other groups we looked at look at that first one, the water washing theory as like probably the closest to what happened as of right now. Right, that's what people point to, at least in the mainstream media.
Yeah, and again we're going kind of in order of plausibility and some thing like the something like that initial theory, the water washing does seem to be the most accurate based on what we know. With the next few theories we verge into the realm of conspiracy, and one of the juiciest ones is the idea that this may have been to a degree purposeful. And again this is just a theory, but the idea is someone at UC said, we need a reason to close this factory.
Well, yeah, they were bleeding money at this facility, right, yeah, yeah, I mean that's just a fact.
That part is true, and you can see on the financials that they were indeed running at a loss.
For some time.
And I didn't know this. I don't know if you guys knew this. But at the time, if you're like a if you're a foreign owned company, and again the American based Union Carbide, they are the majority shareholder of the Indians subsidiary. If you are a company that wants to shut down your factory in India at this time in the eighties, you have to get permission from the government of India to do it. You can't just pull
out of the country. So if they wanted to shut this thing down, if they are hemorrhaging money, then their next question becomes how do we make a good case to the Government of India in this argument. In this theory, management wanted like a p Andac style pearl harbor. They wanted, at least in their perspective, they wanted a minor accident, something that would give the government enough of a off putting vibe or sour taste that they would allow Union
Carbid to close the plant. And so the idea here is that they were going to stage just a little leak. They were going to let something kind of dangerous slide through. There was precedent, this had happened again more than sixty times over the past four years. But the people who hatched this conspiracy in this theory, they never meant the mic leak to reach this level of danger. Yeah, that's a very disturbing allegation.
Yeah, well okay, but let's look at let's look at what Union Carbid did after this disaster. Did they go in and clean up the facility and try and get it to work again, or try and repair anything. No, Union Carbide literally let that factory rocked, didn't touch it, didn't go in and clean up anything after themselves. Right, they didn't. That's one of the major issues in this story is that union CARBI just said, Oh, well, I guess that one's broken, so we don't need that anymore.
We're not going to use it anymore, and we don't need to think about it, which is mind blowing to me. First of all, it feels like a huge asset. But I guess the cleanup costs. Maybe they'd did some kind of back room math and they realized that the cleanup costs would far exceed any potential profits from the facility, which also.
Makes us wonder how fully they did or did not grasp the magnitude of contamination. You know what I mean, because even in their official statements there's a lot of hedging in the.
Beginning until they did their secret testing.
But yeah, the bill comes due. We're going to pause for one more break for a word from our sponsors, and then will introduce the Soviet element.
True story. That's a weird.
Sentence to say, but it is a true story. We've returned last. No, this is what we're talking about. Right, The very last of the main theory slash conspiracies blames the leak on not accidents, not large scale insurance fraud, but on actual warfare.
Right, and we know that when it comes to war, you're going to kind of take whatever leg up you can get. There are opportunists everywhere, especially when it comes to getting an advantage, you know, over an opponent on the battlefield. So it should comes no surprise at the pro Soviet elements that were active at the time in India immediately declared, you know, and this is all in the war of public opinion as well, declared the strategy to be quote a deliberate chemical warfare experiment on the
part of the United States, so they're basically waging info war. Here, Ekerman provides some really excellent context around this writing. A research and development unit was set up in Bopaul in nineteen seventy six. The center, the biggest in Asia, had five insect rearing laboratories and a two hector experimental farm for testing chemical agents. Here new molecules were synthesized and tested it along quote maybe someone.
Else sposed to go on, Yeah, what we can we can summarize here It looks like the Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide was conducting field studies of their of these chemical agents they're creating. And when they were doing these field studies, there were being a little off book about it, like there wasn't the proper oversight. You could call it plausible deniability or just lack of a good chain of command for reporting. But apparently upper management wasn't fully aware
of what they were doing. And the It's strange because you know, it makes me think of conversations in the past about the gray area between nuclear enrichment for peaceful purposes versus nuclear enrichment for weapons of war. You know, a chemical factory, civilian chemical factory can very easily cross a porous border from civilian research to military research and applications. You know what I mean.
Yeah, it's gain of function research to prevent the next infectious disease from becoming a pandemic when it gets out into the world, or using that same research to develop an infectious disease that is way way more dangerous. Yeah.
Yeah, And everybody you talked to, no matter what, everybody you talked to will say, well, our guys are working on preventing it.
You know what I mean.
Department of Defense.
Uh huh, yeah, yeah, it's in the name.
In the name. Did you not reat the whole name anyway? The the idea here, which is really disturbing is that the Indian subsidiary was running a chemical warfare center or running chemical warfare experiments outs out of their factory there
and that. So again there's Soviet propaganda, but this was taken as fact by a lot of people in India at the time, the belief that the MIC might have been purposely deployed similar to other earlier tests in the United States and thinking about stuff like Operation Large Area Coverage, you know, wherein the US wanted to measure dispersal dispersal
patterns of aerosol agents. And so what they did is they put together something they thought was a pretty innocuous substance that they could trace, and they released it over vast swathes of the US, targeting poor areas in particular.
Yeah. Oh, it wasn't completely innocuous for humans though, right it was not.
No, they said it was, but they were thought they weren't spraying this over DuPont Circle, let's put it that way.
No, Yeah, that's a really good point.
Yeah, I don't know.
That's the thing though, Like this is tricky because if you're the average person you're hearing about this, you're asking yourself how on Earth? Could this have happened? And then someone tells you it might have been a conspiracy, a secret operation, and they're able to point to earlier, like earlier, concurrent things the US has done on its own soil.
Then it starts to look more and more plausible. And the Soviets would have been aware of those operations, by the way, well before the American public was aware.
Yeah, it makes you think, it does. I don't like the way it makes me think, but it certainly does.
We do know.
Also, speaking of disturbing facts, the Pentagon sent a medical team after the disaster to collect intelligence on the effects of the leaked gas.
So that's like, get the research. There's a disaster, at least have an understanding. Ye at least that is the way you'd sell it. From a pr perspective. The Pentagon's just going this disaster occurred, We're going to get our best understanding what occurred to again maybe prevent an attack.
In the preventure. And you know, with that, again, it's the perspective that's tricky because if you already suspect that the US, through a corporate proxy, may engage in these kind of heinous acts, then you'll see a lot of adjacent facts that tie into that narrative. But if you think, oh, you know, these substances are just dangerous, of course you want to learn as much as you can about them,
then that fact also makes sense. One thing's for certain, though, regardless of where you fall on the cause, this irreparably ruined and ended thousands of innocent lives. These are average people living in the neighborhood. They're not super wealthy. They're not heads of state, they're not in charge of Union Carbide India Limited. And the survivors are not conspiracy theorists, you know what I mean. They're not like Bopaul Truthers or something.
No.
No, And perhaps the most damning thing about it, in a very real way, this disaster has never ended. People are still researching it today. There was a study we found from last year that greatly expands upon the number of people affected and the ways of which they were affected. And Matt, I think this speaks to something we foreshadowed a little bit earlier in the show This Evening.
Yeah, nineteen eighty four December, this occurs. The company that owns the factory, the property on which this disaster occurred, they just shut down the factory and walked away.
They have been around the dusty trail.
They have been pursued like legally by the country of India to come back there and you know, clean up the mess that they made. But again they kind of argue that they didn't make the mess, it was an accident or whatever. They shirk responsibility. But India has been trying to get them back to the country and hold them accountable since nineteen eighty four and it still hasn't happened.
Yes, yeah, maybe it's just a difference between the relation. I mean, I don't know. We certainly have industries here that shirk their responsibilities. But at least when the government makes a nuclear waste dump site, they at least create a program to clean it up and designate them as like super fund sites and things like that.
Right with some public the p not all the time. So I want to get to this twenty twenty three study we just mentioned. So this study again greatly expands the amount of people affected and it expands our understanding
of how they were affected. What they found is that the medical conditions disabilities that are wrought upon people who are exposed to the gas didn't stop with the people exposed that night, also the generation of babies, like the fetuses that were still in the wombs when this accident happened,
they're affected too. And if you look at the demographics of this city in particular, you'll find that men born in nineteen eighty five y're after or like the following months after this disaster, they have a much higher risk of cancer, they have lower education accomplishment, and they have much higher rates of disabilities compared with those born before or after nineteen eighty five, So that one year is a start outlier.
Yeah, well, and that's the beginning, right, that's from that initial release, and they're already within i don't know what you call it, within the impact zone of all the other chemicals that have been leaking out of that factory for years, and now like they're getting hit by the effects of water and soil contamination of all the chemicals that were left there just to sit and rot and begin to leach again out of those ponds that were man made and created to what do they call it
evaporation ponds, where noxious chemicals are put in there to theoretically evaporate at least somewhat into the atmosphere.
Is that a part of the manufacturing process or is that a cleanup mitigation?
That's a cleanup mitigation.
Well, there's no cleanup mitigation.
Well that's like that's in theory, that's what that's meant to do.
I see, that's what the company would do. They'd have it on site, so when they're finished using those things, it would gradually go back into the atmosphere rather than just you know, shout in a cloud. But there's a study in nineteen ninety nine that showed ground water and well water that's anywhere near that site had six million times the mercury that is allowed by the EPA.
And we're talking about to be clear, we're talking about two different studies, because again there are multiples. The one you're mentioning, Matt, the well water measured is from a study in the nineties. The one i've been ninety nine. The one I've been mentioning is from twenty twenty three. To show you how long people are looking at this, is it? Okay? If I had one more fact about the twenty twenty three study.
Absolutely okay.
So this study found that the outcomes, the health outcomes for people who were affected by this, it ranged much farther than previously assumed. It went far beyond what previous studies had found about, you know, the surrounding neighborhoods. People from as far away as sixty two miles were affected by the disaster and continued to be affected today.
And I guess my only pointment is that I think that has less to do with that gas that got released and more to do with the overall contamination that that site represents from that one leak plus all of the other just noxious crap that they left there and didn't do anything with.
And this is the fact that the science and the research continues is huge news. The most recent reports are some of the first things to demonstrate a clear, provable link between this disaster and the effect on children in Utero. And we know that there are going to be more reports coming, and we know that these problems will continue because, as we've mentioned a little bit throughout this episode, it's still not clean. There are still something around four hundred
tons of assortied industrial waste present on the site. Like you said, they closed, they turned the key, and they clapped their hands and they walked away. The Dow Chemical Company bought Union carbide in two thousand and one, and neither Dow nor the Indian subsidiary, nor the Indian government have properly cleaned the site to this day.
No I did. It's just so horrifying. There's another study two thousand too, that showed the contamination of women's breast milk who again, like you're talking sixty two miles like radius, who live very far away from this site, but they're still being affected because the water flows to everybody.
You know.
It's just goddess.
I mean, I guess the closest thing I can think of, I mean, aside from you know, maybe three Mile Island, and obviously Chernobyl didn't happen here, but it reminds me in a certain way of what happened in Flint, Michigan, with the water contamination and just the complete lack of doing anything about it for the longest time, and like toxic sludge coming out of the you know, faucet, and
this is way way worse. But that's just I'm trying to think of to wrap my head around at any kind of parallel And to your point, Ben, it really makes sense that this is the most significant biological catastrophe in the history of you said, the.
World, right, human history.
Yeah, and yet I was woefully unfamiliar with it, which I'm maybe speaks to a certain amount of blinders that are on and whether in the media or whatever. And that it took this long for there to even be a Netflix documentary about it, you know.
Yeah, agreed, and we do have updates, you know, as time wends on. A Union car By does reach a settlement with the Indian government through mediation in the Supreme Court, and they accept moral responsibility. They do have this settlement that they pay out. The settlement is controversial because it doesn't when it gets down to the per person, per survivor per victim basis, it's not enough to help really and.
It's not to clean up anything. It's just to give a little bit of money to victims.
Right. Yeah, And in nineteen ninety eight, the former factory site officially gets turned over to the state that'd be Madhya Pradesh. And we have to ask ourselves, you know, what happens next. Union Carbide is doing just fine.
What is their status, Like there's still chemical conglom Okay, there's a subsidiary of Dow Chemicals, and isn't that the funny thing that happens with those kinds of acquisitions so often they're about disguising the sins of the past. Right.
Yeah, And Dow Chemicals, through its subsidiary Union Carbide, they still make a lot of chemicals. They're often chemicals not sold directly to the public, but other businesses buy them and they use those chemicals to make stuff like pink packaging, household products, personal care, pharmaceuticals, textiles, automotive products, agricultural products. It goes on and on and on, and yeah, they're still making pesticides.
Well, like, the big players at Dow were very upset and a bunch of shareholders were very upset when the decision was made to acquire Union Carbide because of this disaster, because of the potential lit gation and just all about yeah, but they still did it. And then Dow turned around and said, no, guys, we accept no responsibility for any of this stuff, and uh, we're not going to clean
up the site. That's y'all's thing. Still, So, but is it who's Because it's it was under the control of the state then at that point, right, that's.
Why, So they're just they're just shutting it off. Back onto the state. We're saying, yeah, we're no longer involved.
Because Dow acquired Union Carbone in two thousand and one, so at that point it was not They're not our problem anymore.
Bruh, that's correct, and that's this is the thing that haunts means a question we would I think it haunts all of us. It's a question we would love your take on. Fellow conspiracy realist. The question becomes, how powerful
are these conglomerates. Is it true, as some have accused, that a conglomerate could be powerful enough to, if it's so wished, so press the real cause of an ongoing disaster of this magnitude, effectively burying the stuff they don't want you to know, the same way that they bury those chemicals in the ground. It's a somber question, but these things are important and we would love to hear from you. Thanks again to everybody who wrote to us
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