Carbide Plant Admits Spill’s Cancer Threat : Chairman Orders Tests on ‘a Whole Mess of Chemicals’

A suspected cancer-causing agent was among a mix of chemicals that leaked from a Union Carbide plant near here Sunday and sickened 135 people, company chairman Warren Anderson said today.

Anderson, in his first public appearance in Charleston after gas leaks from two local Union Carbide plants this week, told a questioner at a press conference that “a whole mess of chemicals” was involved in the accident Sunday, including methylene chloride, which he said has caused cancer in laboratory animals.

He said that tests to determine exactly what chemicals were involved are under way and that results probably will not be known until next week.

Percentage Estimated

Anderson declined comment on a Los Angeles Times report that the substance represented 65% of the leak. (Story on Page 6.)

The Times quoted Rick Horner of the Environmental Protection Agency as saying that, according to Union Carbide and EPA tests, the gas cloud was only 35% aldicarb oxime.

The Times said methylene chloride, widely used as a paint remover, was placed under special review by the EPA in May after laboratory tests linked it to unusual numbers of malignant lung and liver tumors in mice.

Union Carbide originally said the leak, a 300-yard-long cloud of toxic gas that caused 135 people to seek treatment for severe nausea, breathing difficulties and eye irritation, was aldicarb oxime.

Aldicarb oxime is a derivative of methyl isocyanate, the deadly chemical that leaked from the Bhopal, India, plant and killed an estimated 2,500 in the worst industrial accident in history.

Another Union Carbide official, apparently seeking to blunt the impact of Anderson’s remarks, said that tests on the chemical are continuing and that the substance is not officially considered a carcinogen.

Anderson, appearing calm, spent much of the press conference reassuring worried residents of the Kanawha Valley, a center of the chemical industry.

“I know people stay up at night and worry. I want them to know I do the same thing,” he said.

“We don’t want to whitewash this, not paper it over, but regain the feeling that this community has to have that, in fact, we know what we are doing, that we are in control.”

Union Carbide officials have been criticized for waiting 20 minutes before alerting municipal authorities in Institute about the gas leak and for not programming a computerized plant safety system to predict the movement of aldicarb oxime.

Anderson did not address either criticism directly but said, “There were some things that could have been improved upon.”