Bhopal and BP

[malaise]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/07-5
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What does this tardy verdict mean for accountability for the ongoing BP spill? As we consider a fitting punishment for BP, the length of the Bhopal trial should be shocking enough. But even if the executives are indeed punished, it will be at best partial victory, as the convicted only represent a few surviving, now-elderly, representatives of the of UCC's defunct Indian subsidiary. Conspicuously absent is the primary accused, Warren Anderson, UCC's American CEO. In keeping with UCC's top-down managerial style, Anderson had personally signed off on the Bhopal plant's design flaws and safety lapses. Anderson absconded in 1984 from an Indian warrant charging him with culpable homicide in the Bhopal case.

Now in his eighties, Anderson lives in comfortable retirement in Florida. India has requested Anderson's extradition, but the US has declined to produce him. Anderson's success at evading liability is instructive as we watch BP trying to shift blame onto its subcontractors. At a press conference after the gas leak he infamously took "moral, but not legal, responsibility" for Bhopal, a move which has inspired many CEO's in trouble since. He and UCC then, serially, blamed the accident on "Sikh terrorists," the Indian subsidiary, and, finally, a particular, but to date unnamed,"disgruntled employee." This despite a lengthy paper trail of procedural lapses, accidents, and deactivated safety systems at the factory. 25 years ago Bhopal defied risk predictions about the possible scale of industrial disasters. So why in 2009 was the EPA willing to accept at face value BP's assurance that an oil spill at their rig was "unlikely" -- and that even if it happened "no significant adverse effects expected"? Did we learn nothing from Bhopal?

Not exactly: the strong environmental safety legislations passed in the 1980's in fact all followed high-profile disasters. The Comprehensive Environmental Response and Compensation Act (1980) passed after Hooker Chemical's Love Canal disaster in the 1970's. Congress passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act (1986), and the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (1986) following Bhopal. And the Oil Pollution Act (1990), protecting the environment a little (requiring environmental impact statements) and the industry a lot (e.g. the infamous $75 million cap on damages) became law in the wake of the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill.

This Oil Pollution Act was reflective of liberal anxieties about the environment, but also of conservative anxieties about environmentalists. Its passage began a slow unraveling in the US of the 1980's safety gains, reinforced by the sense of impunity that emerged from the legal trials over these disasters. Though Exxon was originally held liable for an unprecedented $5 billion in damages for the Valdez spill, this was reduced through appeal to a mere $507.5 million (hardly a number to make BP, with daily profits of $62 million, quake in its boots). And though no one died in the Exxon spill, this much-reduced award still exceeded the $470 million civil settlement reached in 1990 between India and UCC in an Indian legal system direly unprepared for a tort case of this scale. India had originally filed the Bhopal litigation against UCC in a New York court. Judge Keenan, however, refused the precedent-setting opportunity to try the case under our well-developed tort law system, arguing, despite India's pleas, that to try the case would be a form of "continued imperialism."