The long, dark shadow of Bhopal: still waiting for justice, four decades on

The cloud of poisonous gas that leaked from a rusting chemical plant in 1984 still blights the lives of tens of thousands of people in the Indian city, including many not born then. But Union Carbide never answered for the devastating contamination. Photographer Judah Passow spent a year recording the lives of some victims of the disasterJust after midnight on 2 December 1984 a storage tank at the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal began leaking a gas called methyl isocyanate (MIC). The plant, in Madhya Pradesh, India, was equipped with six safety systems designed to detect such a leak, none of which were operational that night. Twenty-seven tons of MIC gas spread throughout the sleeping city.As an engineer was flushing water through a corroded pipe in the MIC production complex, a series of valves failed, allowing the water to flow freely into one of the three-storey tanks holding the toxic chemical in a liquid state. This caused a rapid and violent reaction. The tank shattered in its concrete casing and spewed a deadly cloud of MIC, hydrogen cyanide, monomethylamine and other chemicals, all of which hugged the ground.The derelict Union Carbide plant sits on a 20-hectare (49-acre) site in Bhopal's old town Continue reading...