Europe

Home page

Europe

Hungary spill pollution eases, no big risk to Danube

08 October 2010 23:23 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Pollution levels from a red sludge spill in Hungary have subsided in the Danube and there is no risk of a biological or environmental catastrophe in the major European waterway, Hungarian officials said on Friday, APA reports quoting â€œReutersâ€.
Interior Minister Sandor Pinter told a news conference that the spill had not affected the drinking water supply so far and government spokeswoman Anna Nagy said the food chain was safe.
"Let’s not even consider the pollution that got into the Danube as real pollution now, as the material that got into the river has pH levels of below 9, which, considering the (large volume of) water, will dilute in a few kilometers," Pinter said.
"...It will not be of an extent which would cause biological or environmental damage," he added.
Tibor Dobson, a spokesman for disaster crews, told Reuters that pH levels were at 8-8.2 in the Danube, which could be considered "normal," down from a level of around 9 when the sludge reached the river on Thursday.
"These data give us hope ... and we have not experienced any damage on the main Danube so far," Dobson said. Crews have sought to dilute the alkaline content of Monday’s spill from a containment reservoir of Ajkai Timfoldgyar alumina plant.
There were still no estimates of the financial damage wrought by the sludge -- waste from bauxite refining that has a strong caustic effect -- over an area of 800-1,000 hectares (1,920-2,400 acres). The disaster’s cause remained unknown.
While there is a good chance the spill’s impact on the Danube would be limited, western Hungarian villages that bore the brunt of the sludge torrent on Monday could suffer in the longer term, environmental group Greenpeace said.
It said it had taken test samples from sludge in Kolontar, located closest to the burst reservoir of the alumina plant, showing that data taken by government health and science agencies had underestimated the ecological dangers unleashed.
GREENPEACE WARNING
Greenpeace said that conclusion was supported by findings of the Federal Environmental Institute in Vienna and the Balint Analytical Institute in Budapest.
It said Hungary’s National Academy of Sciences noted there were no heavy metals or mercury found that exceed the normal environmental limit, but omitted any mention of chromium and arsenic pollutants.
"We don’t know when they conducted the tests and how. Our data are very different. That is all that we know," Greenpeace Hungary Director Zsolt Szegfalvi told reporters, saying arsenic, mercury and chromium levels were especially high at Kolontar.
"This contamination poses a long term risk to both the water base and the (surrounding) ecosystem," a Greenpeace statement said. "As long as the environment is alkaline, these materials are bound in the mud. As soon as the alkalinity is reduced... these heavy metals are gradually released to the environment."
Five people were killed and more than 150 injured in the disaster. Another three people were missing. Many local inhabitants suffered from burns and eye ailments caused by caustic and corrosive elements in the sludge mass.
There were reports of sporadic fish death on Thursday in the Raba and Mosoni-Danube rivers earlier affected by the spill in the west of the central European country. All waterlife died in the smaller Marcal River, first struck by the spill.
Crews were monitoring water quality on the Danube as the pollution moved downstream toward Budapest. But experts hoped the pollution would be contained within Hungary’s borders.
Downstream from the disaster site, the Danube flows through or skirts Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Moldovan and Ukrainian territory en route to the Black Sea.
Hungary declared a state of emergency in three counties on Tuesday after the sludge plowed into Kolontar, Devecser and other villages 160 km (100 miles) west of Budapest.