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There are 30 other big gas plants in and around Mexico City, the world's largest metropolis (pop. 18 million). One facility frequently cited as a potential "time bomb" is a refinery at Azcapotzalco, in the northern part of the city, that was built in 1959. At the time, few people lived in the area; now the neighborhood is as crowded as the rest of Mexico City. Says one worried housewife: "If there were an accident, we would be talking of thousands of lives lost, not hundreds." In the aftermath of the San Juan Ixhuatepec disaster, there have been calls to shut down or relocate the refinery to more isolated quarters, but either course would cost a prohibitive $300 million. "High risk," said a report by the Mexican presidential commission on industrial accidents, "should not be interpreted as imminent danger."
In another example of a primary mishap in North America, plumes of noxious malathion last October wafted from an American Cyanamid pesticide plant in New Jersey to cover most of Staten Island, N.Y. About 150 people were treated after inhaling the fumes.
Western Europe also has its share of potential disasters. That lesson was made clear eight years ago, when a chemical reaction at a plant in Seveso, outside Milan, Italy, set off a mild explosion, discharging a cloud of between 1 lb. and 22 lbs. of poisonous dioxin into the atmosphere. Since then, 10 million cu. ft. of contaminated earth has been buried in large pits and covered with clay, plastic sheets and cement. Newly seeded grass masks any signs of the event. Although no one died because of the mishap, it remains to be seen whether the local cancer rate will have increased as a result of the severe dioxin exposure.
Several European countries produce or import an array of deadly compounds, among them methyl isocyanate (MIC). In Britain, a division of Ciba-Geigy Chemicals, Ltd., is the only company permitted to deal with the substance. Located two miles from Grimsby, a town of 92,000, the firm imports and stores the chemical in 45-gal. stainless-steel drums. No more than 18,000 gal. is kept in stock at one time. But even with these precautions, Grimsby villagers gathered in protest after they found out that the lethal compound was being held in their midst. They were led by Anthony White, a resident of nearby Pyewipe, who said bitterly: "If someone mentally disturbed broke into the works and released the stuff, we would all be killed."
Among the biggest stockpilers of MIC in Europe is France. In the southern countryside of Béziers, La Littorale, SA, a Union Carbide affiliate, stores some 20 tons of the chemical, which it imports from the U.S. because the French government prohibits the manufacture of MIC. La Littorale officials proudly point to the facility's extensive security features. The air in the plant is automatically monitored, and should any gas escape from a drum an alarm would call in a crack emergency team. If large enough, the leak would also trigger a water system to deluge and wash down the MIC. Declares Heinz Trautmann, president of La Littorale: "The situation in France is very different from that in India."