1984 - Environment

Environment

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) founded March 9 at Washington, D.C., by lobbyist Fred L. Smith Jr. will work to fight against "big government" regulation of fossil fuel producers, utility companies, the automobile industry, and organizations bent on reducing air pollution.

French biologist Alexandre Meinesz, 38, of the University of Nice explores the Mediterranean seabed off Monaco and finds a square yard of lush, bright green algae never seen before outside tropical waters. The director of Monaco's prestigious Oceanographic Museum dismisses the warning he raises of a potential species invasion, but Meinesz and other biologists will find that a Stuttgart zoo imported some of the seaweed (Caulerpa taxifolia) for its aquarium, the algae brought in was a mutant that could withstand relatively cold water, pet shops obtained some for use in home fish tanks, a sample was sent to the Oceanographic Museum when it was headed by Jacques Cousteau, and the museum evidently dumped some of the weed into the sea while cleaning its tanks. Protected by its toxicity to fish, sea urchins, and other herbivores, the algae grows one inch per day and proliferates through non-sexual (cloning) reproduction; within 15 years it will have covered 10,000 acres of ocean bottom along the shores of France, Italy, Spain, and Croatia, and by the end of the century it will be crowding edible seaweed varieties along part of California's coastline, posing a threat to marine life and defying efforts to eradicate it.

Mexico City loses some 300 homes November 19 as 50,000 barrels of gas explode at a depot of the state oil company, Pemex, killing at least 500.

A Union Carbide pesticide plant operated entirely by Indians at Bhopal, India, leaks the lethal gas methyl isocyanate (MIC) early in the morning of December 3, killing 2,500 outright and injuring perhaps 200,000 in the chemical industry's worst disaster ever. A plant operator noticed the pressure inside a storage tank to be higher than normal an hour before midnight December 2 but not outside the tank's working pressure. A leak of MIC was reported near the vent gas scrubber 15 minutes after midnight, rumbling sounds came from the tank and a screaming noise from the safety valve; radiated heat could be felt from the tank, and employees ran for their lives, leaving townspeople to be killed in their sleep without warning. The death toll quickly rises to 7,000, far more people will be left blind, suffer birth defects, and die from cancer or tuberculosis, the Indian government will sue Union Carbide for $3 billion, India's Supreme Court in February 1989 will order the company to pay $470 million in damages, but it will not sustain criminal charges against Union Carbide executives.