Union Carbide was unable to say that such an accident was unforeseeable.
Leaky valves in the MIC system had been a problem at the Bhopal plant on at least six occasions before the accident. One of these gas leaks involved a fatality. Moreover, Union Carbide had a plant in Institute, West Virginia, that also produced MIC. The experience in West Virginia was similar to that in Bhopal before the acci- dent. There had been a total of 28 leaks of MIC over the previous fi ve years, none leading to any serious problems. An internal Union Carbide memo from three months before the Bhopal accident warned of the potential for a runaway reaction in MIC storage tanks in West Virginia and called into question the adequacy of emergency plans at the plants. The memo concluded that “a real potential for a serious incident exists” [ US News and World Report , Feb. 4, 1985, p. 12]. Apparently, these warnings had not been transmitted to the plant in India.