Compensation and cleanup after Bhopal were dramatically narrower than after Deepwater Horizon.

Evidence

Deep Horizon killed eleven people instantly, whereas Bhopal killed 3,500 instantly and thousands more in the months thereafter. According to Indian government records, the Union Carbide disaster adversely affected the health of 578,000 people. The U.S. Congress swiftly exacted from BP a pledge to ring-fence an initial 20 billion, with a projected compensation of 34 billion. Compensation could be claimed for, among other things, death, personal injury, environmental cleanup, public health concerns, property damage, lost jobs, and lost income. By contrast, in Bhopal the kind of damage subject to compensation was severely circumscribed: only death or personal injury counted. Moreover, after compensation the factory disaster site continues to inflict casualties: Dow (which bought out Union Carbide) still has not cleaned up 450 tons of hazardous waste that continues to leach into the city’s aquifers and soil. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 836

Categorization

• SHARE: Good citable comparison for someone teaching disaster liability — $20B ring-fenced for BP vs. circumscribed Bhopal claims.
• XREF: Doubles as evidence for chapter 9’s point that only certain suffering genres/states get compensation.