On the night of 2–3 December 1984, a leak of methyl isocyanate gas from the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, spread over the densely populated neighbourhoods surrounding the factory. Water entering a storage tank triggered a runaway reaction, and safety systems that should have contained or neutralised the release were out of service or under capacity.
The official immediate death toll was 3,787, and later estimates of deaths linked to the exposure run far higher. Hundreds of thousands of people were injured, many with lasting respiratory, eye and neurological damage. Contamination of soil and groundwater around the abandoned site remains a concern decades later.
In this episode we go through the sequence of events on the night, the maintenance and cost-cutting decisions that preceded it, the failures in emergency response, and the legal and regulatory changes that followed one of the worst industrial disasters in history.
