The mention in this thread about Bhopal reminded me of what my sisterexperienced last week.
The explosion occurred at a plant that was owned by Union Carbide at the time of the Bhopal disaster. The WV plant also made methyl isocyanate. We called it “Bhopal East.” It still makes MIC, although Union Carbide sold the plant years before they were bought by Dow. MIC, incidentally, is used in making the insecticide carbaryl, known to most of us by the trade name Sevin.
My sister lives maybe 5 miles from the plant. She and her husband heard a huge boom that night, loud enough that they looked at each other and said, “What the hell was THAT?”
The Kanawha River valley is narrow. River, then railroad tracks on both sides, a little bit of flat land, then hills. Evacuation would be a nightmare. So the emergency plan is “shelter in place.” We have tornado sirens here. Where my sister lives they have “shelter in place” sirens. Go inside, close off sources of outside air, and wait. Duct-taping windows is optional.
Tornado warning? No problem. I track it on radar and can see what’s happening. Chemical plant release? Yikes! You don’t know what it is, and you don’t know where it’s headed.
As it happened, no death-dealing chemicals escaped. Whew!
I grew up in WV’s Chemical Valley. Union Carbide at one end. DuPont at the other. FMC in between. When I was a kid, we all heard that we were one of the prime targets of the Reds. But all the really scary things that have happened (I remember a big chlorine gas release from FMC) have been ours alone. Go figure.
My hubby wants to know if you remember the “4 o clock stench.” He grew up on Patrick Street and says that the smell was…erm…something you’d never forget.
I grew up in Kanawha City. Given the proximity of the sewage treatment plant to Patrick Street, I can only imagine what the “4 o’clock stench” was. I am definitely aware of the sewage plant when I’m visiting my sister, who lives near Montrose.
There’s another smell I associate with South Charleston that I can’t even describe. It is very much a chemical plant smell. Not sulfurous or organic/shitty. Kind of disgustingly sweet.
He tells me that the stench came from Carbide’s wastewater treatment plant, and sometimes was bad enough to knock a goat over. I’ve smelled that stench you’re talking about and yeah, I have that same impression of the smell. If I remember correctly, it’s some kind of 'sweetner" that’s put into the system to try and make what’s going thru smell better but IMO, it’s a bit worse:eek:
Wow, sounds like fun, kids. Well, actually here in the desert we get a stench coming up from the great Salton Sea. When there is a fish die-off and the wind comes from the southeast, the smell is unreal. In fall and spring I like to sleep with the front door open (screen door locked, all you stalkers beware) and the smell has startled me out of a deep sleep more than once. The first time it happened, I thought something was seriously wrong with my toilet. And this comes all the way up from the Sea, which has to be maybe 40 miles away.
This was back in the late 60’s-early 70’s, and I believe that Carbide had to clean up their act when the Clean Air Act came around in the 90’s. I’ve lived here since 1994 and the only stench I’ve encountered is the sewage treatment plant.