ABSTRACT
On 1 November 1986, a storage unit owned by the pharmaceutical firm Sandoz (now part of Novartis) on the industrial estate of Schweizerhalle, near the Swiss town of Basel, caught fire, along with nearly 1,300 tons of agrochemical products. Seen by contemporary observers as a capitalist answer to the Chernobyl disaster, “Tchernobâle” has been dubbed one of the “worst environmental catastrophes of all time.” This chapter asks how and to what extent the accident shifted the nature of the environmental politics of Western Europe in the 1980s. It discusses how Schweizerhalle momentarily put the environmental costs of industrial disasters at the heart of public debates. But the accident also revealed the collective ambivalence of European governments toward technological risk. It further prompted the Basel chemical industry to update their industrial and public relations strategies. Using sources such as the scientific literature produced in the aftermath of the event and approaches from public history, this chapter discusses how long-term trends in environmental regulation shaped the response of authorities, international watchdogs, academic communities, the media, and how the public reacted to the short-term shock of Schweizerhalle.
