Cancer Alley: Union Carbide profile

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Union Carbide, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical, was founded in 1898 in Niagara Falls, New York, to produce ethylene and other chemicals. In 1930, the company began building the Hawks Nest Tunnel in West Virginia where workers, who were mostly African-American, were exposed to silica. Many of the workers were denied the use of respirators and over 700 were estimated to have died from the breathing in silica dust which is akin to breathing in shards of glass. In 1962, the company began mining asbestos in King City, California, which it shipped to factories in New Jersey and New York for use in industrial manufacturing. Many workers exposed to asbestos became ill with asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma

Union Carbide, however, is most famous for one of the world’s biggest industrial disasters in Bhopal, India, in December 1984, in which an accidental leak of methyl isocyanate resulted in the deaths of at least 16,000 people and for over 40,000 to be permanently maimed or disabled. The company paid out compensation of $470 million in 1989, but the families of victims in India have continued to fight for a better deal.

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(See the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Enforcement and Compliance History Online for Union Carbide's plant in Hahnville. Note that auto-display of data from this link may be disabled for some browsers. If so, copy the URL manually into a new browser window to see it.)

The company was fined $294 million in 2021 over air pollution caused by industrial flaring at their petrochemical facilities in Louisiana and Texas. Union Carbide’s Taft/Star plant in St. Charles, Louisiana, is currently on the list of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s list of 25 “high priority” facilities in the U.S. that emit ethylene oxide gas at levels that exceeded the agency’s threshold for acceptable lifetime cancer risk. It is also currently fighting some 9,000 claims for asbestos related diseases in the U.S. - juries have awarded the estate of a New Jersey plaintiff $2.38 million in compensation in 2019 and a California plaintiff $37.5 million in 2012.

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To learn more about Union Carbide, see the CorpWatch Gulliver profile here. A complete list of CorpWatch's Cancer Alley profiles may be accessed here.