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A toxic legacy: Eastern Europe dotted with disasters in waiting

The toxic sludge spill in Hungary is just one of the ecological horrors left over from the Soviet era.

By NALISON MUTLER and GEORGE JAHN The Associated Press

BUCHAREST, Romania — Abandoned mines in Romania leach waters contaminated by heavy metals into rivers. A Hungarian chemical plant produces more than 100,000 tons of toxic substances a year. Soil in eastern Slovakia is contaminated with cancer-producing PCBs.

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Perch poisoned by cyanide lie on the bank of the Tisa River in Becej, Yugoslavia, in 2000. The spill originated in Romania when a dam at the Baia Mare gold mine overflowed, causing cyanide to pour into the Lapus and then the Samos river. From there, the polluted water ran west into Hungary.

The Associated Press

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Police detain company head for questioning

DEVECSER, Hungary — Hungarian police have detained the director of the aluminum company responsible for a flood of caustic red sludge that killed eight people when it burst from its reservoir last week, the prime minister said Monday.

Police said they were questioning managing director Zoltan Bakonyi on suspicion of public endangerment causing multiple deaths and environmental damage.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban told parliament that the government wanted to take over MAL Rt., the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company, because the safe restart of production at the alumina plant was needed to save the jobs of thousands of workers.

Orban said his administration was also freezing the company's assets to ensure that funds were available to compensate for the damages caused by the disaster.

"Since this is not a natural catastrophe but the damage was brought about by people, the damages must be paid first and foremost not by taxpayers but by those who caused the damage," Orban told lawmakers.

Last week, Bakonyi said MAL Rt. had not noticed anything irregular at the site. "The reservoir -- which our men patrol daily -- did not show any physical signs that something of this nature could happen," he said.

Orban, however, said the government had other suspicions.

"We have well-founded reasons to believe that there were people who knew about the dangerous weakening of the reservoir wall, but for personal reasons they thought it wasn't worth repairing and hoped there'd be no trouble," Orban said.

– The Associated Press

The flood of toxic sludge in Hungary is but one of the ecological horrors that lurk in Eastern Europe 20 years after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, serving as a reminder that the region is dotted with disasters waiting to happen.

Much of Eastern Europe is free of many of its worst environmental sins with the help of Western funds and conditions imposed on Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic in exchange for membership in the European Union.

Still, the sludge has focused attention on less-visible dangers that survived various cleanups in the region.

The caustic spill in Hungary has also raised questions about whether investors who took over Soviet-era factories from the state 20 years ago are at fault for not spending enough on safety.

Eight people died in the Oct. 4 deluge of red sludge from a 24-acre storage pool where a byproduct of aluminum production is kept.

Calls for greater cleanup efforts apply not only to Hungary, which considered itself ahead of most of the former Soviet bloc in fixing ecological harm, but also to neighbors like Serbia that hope to join the 27-nation bloc.

"The scary thing is we didn't know this existed and there could be other ones," said Andreas Beckmann, director of the World Wildlife Fund Danube-Carpathian program, alluding to the Hungarian spill.

"How many other facilities and sites are there that could be a ticking time bomb?" Beckmann said

Environmentalists warn of other potential disasters from seven storage ponds about 60 miles northwest of Budapest that hold 12 million tons of sludge accumulated since 1945 -- more than 10 times the amount that spilled last week.

"If the gates break there, much of Hungary's drinking water would be endangered," said WWF official Martin Geiger.

Other sites – like the Borsodchem plant in northeastern Hungary – pose similar risks to groundwater. That factory churns out 100,000 tons of the toxin PVC that contains dioxin, the same poison released into the air by a factory explosion in Seveso, Italy 34 years ago that killed hundreds of animals and turned much of the town into a no man's land.

Slovakia, Hungary's northern neighbor, has its own toxic problems, including a huge area in the east of the country that is still contaminated with PCBs from communist times.

Government officials in Bulgaria, alarmed by the Hungarian spill, have ordered safety checks of a dozen waste dams – huge reservoir walls that hold back often heavy metal-laden waste that are prone to leaks or collapse.

In Bulgaria's most serious such accident, walls at a lead and copper processing factory in Zgorigrad broke in 1966, releasing a flood of sludge that killed 488 people and left much of the immediate area uninhabitable.

Of particular concern, a WWF report says, is a dam near the town of Chiprovtsi in northwestern Bulgaria because it is directly on the Ogosta River, a major Danube tributary.

Hungary's sludge ponds are a legacy of the Soviet era, when Moscow designated that country as the main producer of alumina, used in the manufacture of aluminum. Reservoirs full of heavy metal-laced sludge are also a threat elsewhere.

A huge storage pond full of corrosive sludge in Romania is part of the landscape of the gritty Danube port of Tulcea. WWF activists say leaks and airborne pollution from the site is responsible for fish and bird deaths nearby.

The Danube appears to have escaped immediate harm from the recent Hungarian spill. The same kind of spill at the Tulcea plant would devastate a vast stretch of lakes and marshes at the Danube's entry into the Black Sea that has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. It hosts more than 300 species of birds and 45 freshwater species of fish.

Memories of an environmental disaster a decade ago in Romania have triggered emergency measures for Tulcea and other suspect sites. That's when a reservoir burst at a gold mine in the northwestern town of Baia Mare on Jan. 30, 2000, spilling cyanide-laden water into local rivers and killing tons of fish and other wildlife.

Some of Eastern Europe's worst environmental horrors were in Romania – among them Copsa Mica, where TV images of black toxic soot from chimneys of a rubber-dye factory falling onto houses, fields, grazing sheep and townspeople shocked the world in 1989.

The Danube is shared by seven countries, and it has been the victim of toxic spills even before Hungary's caustic red muck.

Among the worst incidents came 11 years ago during NATO's bombing of Serbia, when warplanes targeted fertilizer and vinyl chloride manufacturing plants and an oil refinery in the town of Pancevo, near Belgrade, releasing mercury, dioxins and other deadly compounds into the river.

Also near Belgrade, an open pit in Obrenovac just 100 yards from the Sava – a Danube tributary – contains millions of tons of coal ash from the Nikola Tesla Coal Power Plant. The air has unhealthy levels of carbon black, also known as lampblack, for as much as a third of the year. Sprinklers to prevent the ash from becoming airborne are of limited effectiveness on windy days.

Croatia lists nine locations where dangerous waste has been deposited for decades that still need to be cleaned, said Toni Vidan of the group Green Action.

In Vranjic near Split, a factory producing asbestos closed several years ago, but the waste – about 9,100 cubic yards of material mixed with asbestos - hasn't been completely cleaned up. Two years ago, the presence of asbestos in Vranjic was three times greater than allowed. Even today, residents say particles of asbestos are in the air when the wind blows.