Anderson, 92, died on Sep. 29th in Florida.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: It would have been a chance for Warren Anderson, the former chairman and chief executive of Union Carbide, considered a fugitive and absconder in India, to finally see the horrors of the Bhopal Gas tragedy play out in front of him, like he must have played out in his mind hundreds of times before.
As to what transpired that fateful night 30 years ago, on December 2-3, 1984, when more than 10,000 people died in the most lethal industrial disaster in history, and for tens of thousands of more people and their families, it was the beginning of slow cancerous death after being exposed to poisonous gases emanating from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.
But Anderson has been spared of a déjà vu of the horror. He will not be amongst the people who will get to see the massive tragedy that has forever scarred a city, come alive on theater screens when the film Bhopal – A Prayer for Rain, starring Martin Sheen, Kal Penn, and Mischa Barton, makes its worldwide premiere in New York City on November 7, and then in additional cities in the US. The film will make its debut in India a month later.
Anderson died on September 29th at a nursing home in Vero Beach, Florida. He was 92. His death was not announced by his family, but was noticed after a local daily listed it. The secrecy surrounding his death is not surprising, considering that he had warded off extradition to India with the help of the US government for almost three decades, and lived a quiet life shuffling with his wife between homes in Vero Beach; Greenwich, Connecticut; and Bridgehampton, New York, escaping being served notices to appear in court in the US for the deaths in Bhopal.
Anderson, whose first job was with Union Carbide, stayed with the company for his entire career, becoming the president and chief operating officer in 1979, and chairman and CEO in 1982. When he took over, the company had 700 plants in around 40 countries. Then came Bhopal.
The methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas that released from the Union Carbide plant exposed more than half a million people, and apart from the more than 10,000 people who died, left an estimated 40,000 individuals permanently disabled.
It changed Anderson’s life. He resigned from the company in 1986. Four days after the Bhopal gas tragedy, he went to India, but was immediately arrested. He bailed out, however, and once back in the US, never went back to India to face trial, despite repeated requests from the Indian government. Eventually, Union Carbide was sued by the Government of India and agreed to an out-of-court settlement of $470 million in 1989, but for most people, the chief culprit, Anderson, who they believed was the man responsible for lack of maintenance and poor safety standards at the plant that led to the tragedy, escaped without punishment.
In an interview with The New York Times five months after the tragedy, Anderson spoke of his feelings of loss and helplessness. “You wake up in the morning thinking, can it have occurred?” he said. “And then you know it has and you know it’s something you’re going to have to struggle with for a long time.”
The Times reported that Anderson couldn’t sleep after the Bhopal tragedy. At one point he holed up for a week at a hotel in Stamford, Connecticut. He and his wife, Lillian, spent evenings reading newspaper articles about the tragedy to each other. When they went to restaurants, he was afraid to be seen laughing because people “might not think it was appropriate,” he told The Times.
He told The Associated Press in another interview that he was determined to find something positive in the darkness. Although he acknowledged that “people look at me and think I’m out of my mind to say that this may be a good event,” he envisioned the disaster leading to new safety procedures.
2 Comments
there is a rumor some Great politician helped Anderson to escape who is he
oye if he was so concerned and guilty of what happened, he should have given himself up to the Indian authorities and not escaped to america…. am sure he is now in hell with the other likes him such as Hitler