The Last Word

...i "Most of them had had similar expe-i riences...

...As one of my friends put it, "Certain towns just had their certain smells...

...After we moved out of Carbide housing, I met girls whose fathers didn't work for Union Carbide...

...Many live in private homes, bu there are also some 4,500 students at Wes Virginia State College and 250 to 300 blin< and disabled enrollees at the West Virginii Rehabilitation Center...

...Letters to editors of area papers argued that Carbide's factories were safer than the highways, and that the insecticide Sevin, made from MIC, was not a hazardous substance but a lifesaver...

...Later, we learned that a reactive chemical called acrolein had blown the top off a tank car...

...Carbide had paid to have some war workers' homes barged forty miles downriver and re-erected three miles from the company's factory in Institute, West Virginia, near Charleston...

...Eight workers were hurt in the explosion and fire, and the fire department evacuated the residents of Institute...

...Their concern was that the adverse publicity about Bhopal could cost them their jobs, which are doubly precious in the state that has the nation's highest unemployment rate...

...some of them had cancer," Wilson recalls...

...We will have to have a Bhopal here," he told me...

...The Carbide plant in Institute, like th< one in Bhopal, has thousands of closi neighbors...

...The chemical industry will be allowed to monitor itself until there is a disaster...

...But many more resented the questions being asked about Carbide's integrity and competence...

...It was a neighborhood of "Carbide housing...

...The plant in Institute is the only other one that produces methyl isocyanate (MIC...

...There is no clea...

...We will have to have a hundred to a thousand people die here...

...South Charleston was sulfur...

...angry not at Carbide but at Carbide's critics...

...Suddenly, we heard a loud boom...

...State Health Di rector Clark Hansbargar told them to pui wet cloths over their mouths, check the wind direction, and walk crosswind...

...A Charleston Gazette telephone poll ol Kanawha County residents, taken aftei Bhopal, found that 62 per cent believed that a comparable disaster could occur in West Virginia...

...The Reverend Arnold B. Lovell, a Presbyterian minister, urged his fellow citizen not to "rush to judgment about the cor porate policies of Union Carbide, or con demn the company for the Bhopal inci dent before the facts...

...I felt sorry for them...

...My sister, who worked for Carbide for several years, making her way from typist to systems analyst, says some Carbide employees refer to their status as "sucking off the tit of Big Mama Carbide...

...That's the plant," said my father, and he rushed off to investigate...

...He placed a three-lina newspaper ad to hear from others who had been injured by toxic air, and received more than twenty-five calls...

...Residents pointed out that heading crosswind if the wind was blowing in its prevailing eastward direction would mean swimminj the Kanawha River or climbing a mountain...

...Without Carbide, this would be a ghost valley," warned Richard A. Johnson, one of the letter writers...

...they couldn't go to Cliffside or Carlisle, Carbide's summer camps, where a two-week stay cost only $20 in the late 1950s...

...I feel a lot safer in the plant than I do at home...

...But only 15 per cent of the respondents said they had no confidence in the safety of the Valley's chemical plants, while 40 per cent professed to be "very confident" and the rest "somewhat confident...

...Top scale for an operator at the Institute plant is $12.50 an hour...

...Chemicals in the air were a fact of life, like sunshine or rain...

...I thought about my Carbide childhood when I heard, early last December, that a cloud of poisonous MIC gas had killed 2,500 people who lived near a Carbide plant in Bhopal, India...

...You will noi find people who work for the chemical industry saying anything bad about th< chemical industry...

...plan for evacuation in case of emergency At a community meeting held in Insti tute a few days after the Bhopal tragedy residents asked officials what they shouk do if a gas leak occurred...

...Mine did— he was a chemical engineer—and so did most of the daddies in our neighborhood...

...are made known Also, let us not forget what Union Carbid< and the other chemical companies hav< meant to the social, political, and eco nomic fabric of the Kanawha Valley...

...More than 400 employees of Carbide's Technical Center rushed to sign a Sunday newspaper ad last December reaffirming their faith in the company...

...I remembered a Saturday night in April 1955, when my parents were getting ready to go to the monthly dance sponsored by Carbide...

...But they had relatives who worked for the chemical industry and they were reluctant to get involved...

...Don Wilson, who lives one mile eas^ of the Institute plant, says his lungs^ were burned in 1975 by a gas emisi sion from Carbide...

...So I wasn't really surprised to find, when I went back to the Valley a few weeks after the Bhopal tragedy, that most people were Jane Slaughter,, the author of "Concessions—And How to Beat Them," is a staff writer for Labor Notes...

...And James Lovell wrote, "If you compare the lives lost due to the gas leak to lives lost due to starvation before the use of Sevin as an insecticide, Union Carbide looks like a hero----Let us pray that our Government doesn't step in and regulate without knowing MIC from ABC...

...There were, to be sure, some residents who feared a gas leak and worried about the lack of a decent evacuation plan...

...Carbide's young employees bought the transplanted homes and started their families there...

...Nobody who was employed by Carbide would admit to minding much...

...The company is the largest private employer in West Virginia's Kanawha Valley with about 7,000 workers on the payroll...

...Nitro was rotten potatoes...