The moves, directed at enhancing profits included reducing personnel, use of low quality material, cutting down on vital safety measures and adopting hazardous operating procedures" (Parasuraman 337).
MIC is a highly toxic substance used for making carbaryl, the active agent in the pesticide Sevin. It is highly unstable and needs to be kept at low temperatures. UCIL (Union Carbide India Limited) manufactured MIC in large batches and stored it in three very large holding tanks underground (Shrivastava 42). Just the thought of all the dangerous chemicals in such close proximity to a city of about one million people is disturbing, but the facts about the safety systems, or lack thereof, of such a plant is even more disturbing. As Shrivastava goes on to point out, the plant had several systems for safety that either didn't work, or were deliberately shut off to cut costs leading up to the disaster. A device called a scrubber was used to neutralize toxic fumes from MIC storage facilities. The gases leaving the tanks were routed to this scrubber and washed with a caustic soda bath, then released into the atmosphere at a height of around 100 feet, or routed to a secondary safety device called a flare. The flare tower was used to burn the gases from the MIC chambers. Burning the gas would detoxify it before entering the atmosphere. Probably the two most important safety features of the plant are the refrigeration system used to cool the MIC tanks, which would become volatile at higher temperatures than 0 degrees centigrade, and the water spray pipes that controlled escaping gases, over heated equipment and so forth (Shrivastava 45). Now here comes the kicker: Weeks, and in some of the equipment's cases months, before the "accident" the scrubber had been shut off, the flare tower dismantled to replace corroded parts, the refrigeration system was shut down and drained, and nearly 65 tons of MIC gas remained in the storage tanks!.
