just saw a "tragedies iceberg" with titanic and chernobyl at the top and the bhopal disaster near the bottom...i'm begging you to have even the slightest hint of curiosity about the world around you...the bhopal disaster is literally considered the world's worst industrial disaster!!!!!!!!!
it bothers me the way certain industrial disasters are treated as uniquely tragic and terrifying as opposed to others, just because of narratives that can be spread
Take a look at the people that were affected by each. The Titanic affected almost entirely rich people from the US, and Chernobyl affected western europeans. The Bhopal disaster? Poor people from India.
There's a very pointed reason for the disasters that people are aware of being these, even though for all intents, they significantly less impact on the lives of the people around them.
first, the iceberg metaphor is exactly about what's most commonly known, not what's more important or severe. op seems to be getting mad that more people don't know about something while also being annoyed that someone else pointed out many people don't know about that thing.
second, more than half the passengers on the Titanic were in third class and very much not rich, and Chernobyl is extremely not in western Europe.
I think the reason these two stick out as ones held in everyone's consciousness are multifaceted. That they happened in Europe/America is significant because largely there's a feeling in our media and culture that wars and disasters are things that happen to those poor countries over there, not to us, here, in the "civilised" world. The fact that it was impoverished Indians that died in the Bhopal tragedy is significant, because companies deliberately operate unsafely in the global South knowing they can not only extract slave labour and cut costs, but also that the world at large does not care about their lives so safety considerations are not important. Every executive from Union Carbide would be rotting in prison or executed if they'd killed 8000-16000 and injured half a million Americans or Brits.
They were also both disasters that demonstrated the dangers of things previously considered to be very safe and taken for granted.
I think it's also worth pointing out the fact that Chernobyl happened in the USSR during the cold war is significant. The UK also had a nuclear disaster in the Windscale Fire in 1957, which also caused nuclear fallout throughout Europe, and which the UK government also played down and covered up. Almost 2/3rds of global nuclear accidents and disasters have happened in the USA. But I didn't know any of this until I went looking. Because it serves Red Scare propaganda to point at the Evil Communists for their failings at Chernobyl but ignore our play down our similar failings.
