Big Picture Talk: Bhopal 40 years on - What have we learned?

Speaker: Professor Fiona Macleod, Professor of Process Safety, University of Sheffield

On the night of 2 and 3 December 1984 a toxic gas release from the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India caused thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of life-changing injuries. Forty years later, the rusting factory equipment still towers above buried hazardous waste in the abandoned factory. I visited the site of the former Union Carbide site in Bhopal India to try to understand what went so horribly wrong.

1. What caused the worst accident in the history of the chemical industry?
2. Why was the accident never properly investigated?
3. What can we learn about process safety from revisiting the accident?
4. Why has no clean-up been undertaken in 40 years?

Speaker bio

Fiona Macleod is a chartered chemical engineer with over 40 years of international experience in the chemical and power industries. She is Professor of Process Safety at the University of Sheffield and writes crime fiction under the pen name of Fiona Erskine, with six published thrillers and more on the way.