Abstract

Our departmental seminar series, Bigger Picture Talks, runs throughout the academic year, inviting thought-leaders from across the world driving significant advances in our impact areas of energy, health and sustainability to share and discuss their work with us.

This talk will hear from alumni Professor Fiona Macleod, Professor of Process Safety at the University of Sheffield, who will talk about safety in the chemical engineering industry, using the worst disaster in history as a lens for why safety matters.

On the night of 2 and 3 December 1984 a toxic gas release from the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India caused thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of life-changing injuries. Forty years later, the rusting factory equipment still towers above buried hazardous waste in the abandoned factory. I visited the site of the former Union Carbide site in Bhopal India to try to understand what went so horribly wrong.

1. What caused the worst accident in the history of the chemical industry? 2. Why was the accident never properly investigated? 3. What can we learn about process safety from revisiting the accident? 4. Why has no clean-up been undertaken in 40 years?