BP v Union Carbide

Was down the pub last night and a friend mentioned an interesting comparison between the BP oil disaster and the Union Carbide Gas disaster.
The BP oil disaster caused the death of 11 workers, which of couse is a tragedy, and an immense amount of damage to the environment in the Gulf area, and possible else where in due course, plus considerable damage to the local economies . The oil drilling operation was operated on behalf of BP by a third party, under the control of BP.  US is a powerfull country and estimates for the total cost to BP range from $3.2bn to $100bn.
In 1984, Union Carbide India Ltd, owned by Union Carbide USA, caused an estimated 3787 deaths through a gas leakage. The causes for both the BP oil disaster and the Union Carbide disaster are though to result from failure to act upon known weaknesses in operating proceedures and equipment.  India is a poor company with limited power on the wortld stage and the people killed were poor people. The total cost to Union Carbide, as negotiated with the Indian government, was $470M…..  

Hmmm!

This entry was posted on 23/07/2010 at 10:27 pm and is filed under daily stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.