Bhopal
Around midnight on Dec. 2, 1984, an accident at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, resulted in 45 tons of poisonous methyl isocyanate escaping from the facility. Thousands died within hours. More followed over subsequent months — about 15,000 in all. In total, about half a million people were affected in some way. Many of those who survived suffered blindness, organ failure and other awful bodily malfunctions. A shockingly high number of children in the area have been born with all manner of birth defects. In 1989, Union Carbide paid out about half a billion dollars to victims, an amount the afflicted say is not nearly enough to deal with the decades-long consequences. Bhopal remains the worst industrial disaster ever.
Saddam Hussein knew the war was over. He could not have Kuwait, so he wasn't about to let anyone else benefit from its riches. As the 1991 Persian Gulf War drew to a close, Hussein sent men to blow up Kuwaiti oil wells. Approximately 600 were set ablaze, and the fires — literally towering infernos — burned for seven months. The Gulf was awash in poisonous smoke, soot and ash. Black rain fell. Lakes of oil were created. As NASA wrote, "The sand and gravel on the land's surface combined with oil and soot to form a layer of hardened 'tarcrete' over almost 5 percent of the country's area." Scores of livestock and other animals died from the oily mist, their lungs blackened by the liquid.
The Exxon Valdez
On the night of March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground on Bligh Reef in the pristine waters of Alaska's Prince William Sound. The first of what would turn out to be 10.8 million gal. of oil began to spew forth into the cold waters. It would eventually spread almost 500 miles from the original crash site and stain thousands of miles of coastline. Hundreds of thousands of birds, fish, seals, otters and other animals would perish as a result, despite the mobilization of more than 11,000 people and 1,000 boats as part of the cleanup. While the Exxon Valdez oil leak is considered to be the largest man-made environmental disaster in U.S. history, the Gulf of Mexico spill may eventually surpass it in severity.
Tokaimura Nuclear Plant
On Sept. 30, 1999, Japan's worst nuclear accident happened in a facility northeast of Tokyo. Three workers at a uranium-processing plant in Tokaimura, then the center of the Japanese nuclear-power industry, improperly mixed a uranium solution. A blue flash heralded trouble. As TIME wrote, "One [worker] was knocked unconscious. Within minutes, the others were nauseated, and their hands and faces were burned bright crimson." Two ended up dying, and hundreds were exposed to various levels of radiation.
In early April 2010, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon traveled to Central Asia, where he laid eyes upon a "graveyard of ships" — rusting fishing trawlers and other vessels stranded in a desert that stretched for miles in all directions. It was the Aral Sea ... or what used to be the Aral Sea. Situated between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the Aral was once the fourth largest lake on earth, as big as Ireland. Since the 1960s, however, when Soviet irrigation projects diverted several of its source waterways, the Aral has shrunk 90%. What was once a vibrant, fish-stocked lake is now a massive desert that produces salt and sandstorms that kill plant life and have negative effects on human and animal health for hundreds of miles around. Scores of large boats sit tilted in the sand — a tableau both sad and surreal.
Seveso Dioxin Cloud
On July 10, 1976, an explosion at a northern Italian chemical plant released a thick, white cloud of dioxin that quickly settled on the town of Seveso, north of Milan. First, animals began to die. As TIME wrote about a month after the incident, "One farmer saw his cat keel over, and when he went to pick up the body, the tail fell off. When authorities dug the cat up for examination two days later, said the farmer, all that was left was its skull." It was four days before people began to feel ill effects — including "nausea, blurred vision and, especially among children, the disfiguring sores of a skin disease known as chloracne" — and weeks before the town itself was evacuated. Residents eventually returned to the town, and today a large park sits above two giant tanks that hold the remains of hundreds of slaughtered animals, the destroyed factory and the soil that received the largest doses of dioxin.
For years, residents of Minamata, a town located on Kyushu (Japan's most southwesterly island), had observed odd behavior among animals, particularly household cats. The felines would suddenly convulse and sometimes leap into the sea to their deaths — townspeople referred to the behavior as "cat dancing disease." In 1956, the first human patient of what soon became known as Minamata disease was identified. Symptoms included convulsions, slurred speech, loss of motor functions and uncontrollable limb movements. Three years later, an investigation concluded that the affliction was a result of industrial poisoning of Minamata Bay by the Chisso Corp., which had long been one of the port town's biggest employers. As a result of wastewater pollution by the plastic manufacturer, large amounts of mercury and other heavy metals found their way into the fish and shellfish that comprised a large part of the local diet. Thousands of residents have slowly suffered over the decades and died from the disease. It has taken as long for some to receive their due compensation from the corporation.
"Nuclear Nightmare," screamed the April 9, 1979, cover of TIME magazine. On March 28, the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor near Harrisburg, Pa., partially melted down. Coming two weeks after the release of the Jane Fonda film The China Syndrome, the Three Mile Island incident became the natural outlet for fears about the nuclear-power industry. The ironic thing is that while it has become known as one of America's worst nuclear accidents, nothing much really happened. No one died, and the facility itself is still going strong. While the near meltdown is often cited as the reason no new nuclear plant has been built in America in the past 30 years, the industry had begun to slow down construction before Three Mile Island ever happened.
