Hungary braces for second wave of toxic sludge - The Guardian

Hungarian soldiers wait in line to get cleaned with a water jet in Devecser. Photograph: Bea Kallos/EPA

Emergency workers in Hungary have warned that another torrent of toxic red sludge will inevitably be unleashed when the remaining walls collapse at a reservoir which still holds more than 500m litres of the liquid waste.

The prime minister, Viktor Orban, has promised "the toughest possible" consequences for those responsible for the disaster, which has killed at least seven people and spilled millions of litres of toxic waste.

"Behind this tragedy, human errors and mistakes must exist. We are going to reveal all that," Orban said.

But the government has still not decided whether the company can resume production. Shutting down the plant completely would leave thousands out of work.

Cracks in the retaining walls have stopped widening for now, but will inevitably deteriorate, said Hungary's environment secretary, Zoltan Illes. He has already described the incident as the worst chemical accident in his country's history.

Gyorgyi Tottos, a spokeswoman for the disaster crews, said the effort to contain the waste was "a race against time" as further rain threatens to increase pressure on the reservoir wall.

Repair work is continuing. Extra protective walls are being built around the 10-hectare reservoir, near Ajka, and a dam 620 metres long is under construction to save parts of Kolontar not already hit. But experts are not confident that these measures can prevent a further disaster.

"I would describe the situation as hopeful, but nothing has really changed," Tibor Dobson, head of Hungary's disaster management team, told Associated Press. "The wall to protect Kolontar is planned to be finished by tonight, but it will likely be several days before residents may be able to move back."

Almost 800 residents of the town were evacuated on Saturday as a precaution, and 6,000 residents of the next village, Devecser, have been ordered to pack a single bag and be ready to abandon their homes at a moment's notice. Experts have warned a new flood could be even more toxic, because much of what poured out in the original leak was water, leaving the remaining sludge more concentrated.

A week after the original collapse at the alumina plant unleashed a wave of up to 700m litres of red mud which covered fields and seven towns and villages, the long-term effects of the spill are still being assessed. The sludge entered the Danube on Thursday, moving towards Croatia, Serbia and Romania.

Police have confiscated documents from the company, Mal Rt. The company's contingency plans for such a disaster are said to have allowed for only a fraction of what was actually unleashed.

While the torrent has left a trail miles long the colour of dried blood, neutralising chemicals and clay poured into tributaries before it reached the Danube, and the sheer volume of water in Europe's second longest river, seem to be limiting its impact to some extent.

In Romania, authorities are testing the water every four hours and warning people against letting animals drink from the water. However, fishermen were still putting out into the waters, and people still fishing for pike from the banks.

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Sludge cleanup begins in Hungary as search for victims goes on - CNN International

Toxic sludge slams Hungarian villages4 people dead, 6 missing, 116 injured in southwest HungaryWorkers use metal sticks to poke for more victimsFlow may reach the Danube River

Devecser, Hungary (CNN) -- Rescue workers searched Wednesday for six elderly people missing at Kolontar, one of three villages in southwest Hungary that was hit Monday by a wave of toxic red sludge from an alumina plant reservoir that burst.

Wearing chemical protection suits, the workers used metal sticks to poke through muck three-feet deep (1 meter) for the presumed victims, reported MTI, Hungary's official news agency.

At least 116 people were injured, eight of them seriously, when the mishap occurred Monday afternoon, the agency said. Most of them were flown to hospitals in the capital, Budapest.

The reservoir has been repaired and the flow from the pool has halted.

But the material that flowed out of the reservoir continued to pose a threat. On Wednesday, more than 500 National Disaster Management Authority staffers and soldiers and employees of Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company (MAL), the company that owns the alumina plant's reservoir, were trying to halt the advance of the sludge before it reaches the Danube River's tributaries, said Jeno Lasztovicza, head of the defense committee, according to MTI.

The sludge had already reached the Marcal River, which flows into the River Raba, which empties into the Danube. It was expected to show up in the Danube as soon as this weekend, said Imre Szakacs, head of Gyor-Moson-Sopron County's defense authority, MTI said.

Emergency workers were pouring plaster and fertilizers into the Marcal River in hopes that it would bind with the sludge and counter its alkalinity before it reached the Danube, the continent's second-longest river, some 70 km (43 miles) north, reported MTI.

But the material will have been neutralized by the time it reaches the Raba, Interior Minister Sandor Pinter told reporters.

Untreated, the sludge contains heavy metals, which cause burns and eye irritation, he said.

Four people -- two children ages 1 and 3, an elderly woman and a 35-year-old man whose SUV overturned in the sludge -- have been confirmed dead in the environmental disaster, which occurred 160 km (99 miles) west of Budapest, near the town of Ajka.

Residents were advised not to eat produce from gardens that were covered when the dam burst, releasing at least 1 million cubic meters of thick red mud.

It was not clear when residents evacuated from affected areas in the villages of Kolontar, Devecser and Somlovasarhely would be able to return home, nor were the long-term consequences clear.

A state of emergency has been declared in three counties, the State Secretariat of Governmental Communications said.

In a statement on its website, MAL said it "offers its honest condolences to the relatives of all of the victims who lost their lives in the catastrophe."

CNN's Nic Robertson contributed to this story.

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Hungary sludge flood called 'ecological disaster' - The Associated Press

Hungary sludge flood called 'ecological disaster'By BELA SZANDELSZKY and PABLO GORONDI (AP) – 43 minutes ago

KOLONTAR, Hungary — A lethal torrent of toxic red sludge from a metal refinery engulfed towns in Hungary, burning villagers through their clothes and threatening an ecological disaster Tuesday as it swept toward the Danube River.

The flood of caustic red mud triggered a state of emergency declaration by Hungarian officials. At least four people were killed, six were missing and 120 injured, many with burns.

Hundreds were evacuated in the aftermath of the disaster Monday, when a gigantic sludge reservoir burst its banks at an alumina plant in Ajka, a town 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of Budapest, the capital. The torrent of sludge inundated homes, swept cars off roads and damaged bridges.

Named for its bright red color, the material is a waste product in aluminum production that contains heavy metals and is toxic if ingested.

In Kolontar, the town closest to the plant, Erzsebet Veingartner was in her kitchen when the 12-foot-high wave of red slurry hit, sweeping away everything in its path.

"I looked outside and all I saw was the stream swelling like a huge wave," the 61-year-old widow said Tuesday as she surveyed her backyard, still under 6 feet of noxious muck.

"I lost all my chickens, my ducks, my Rottweiler, and my potato patch. My late husband's tools and machinery were in the shed and it's all gone," sobbed the woman, who gets by on a $350 monthly pension. "I have a winter's worth of firewood in the basement and it's all useless now."

Emergency workers wearing masks and chemical protection gear rushed to pour 1,000 tons of plaster into the Marcal River in an attempt to bind the sludge and keep it from flowing on to the Danube some 45 miles away. Nearby, desperate villagers waded through the toxic mud trying to salvage possessions with little more than rubber gloves as protection.

The 1,775-mile-long Danube passes through some of the continent's most pristine vistas from its origins as a Black Forest spring in Germany to its end point as a majestic stretch of water emptying into the Black Sea.

Now a murky green — not blue as immortalized in the Strauss waltz — the river flows through four former communist nations. One of the continent's greatest treasuries of wildlife, it has been the focus of a multibillion dollar post-communist cleanup. Cormorants, swans and other birds are now common sights on the river.

Still, high-risk industries such as Hungary's Ajkai Timfoldgyar alumina plant are still producing waste near some of its tributaries, posing a threat to the waterway.

By Tuesday, about 35.3 million cubic feet of sludge had poured from the reservoir, flooding a 16 square mile area, Environmental Affairs State Secretary Zoltan Illes told the state news wire MTI. He called the spill an "ecological catastrophe."

Dozens of villagers were burned when the caustic material seeped through their clothing. Two women, a young man and a 3-year-old child were killed, and health officials said two of the injured were in critical condition.

Because chemical burns can take days to emerge, seemingly superficial injuries can turn deadly as they penetrate deeper tissue, Dr. Peter Jakabos of Gyor Hospital told state TV.

In nearby Devecser, the sea of muck in Tunde Erdelyi's house was 5 feet high Tuesday and rescue workers had to use an ax to cut through her living room door to let it flow out. Her car had been swept into the garden and her husband's van straddled a fence.

"When I heard the rumble of the flood, all the time I had was to jump out the window and run to higher ground," she said tearfully, adding that she was grateful the family's pet rabbit and cat were safe.

Her husband, Robert Kis, said his uncle was flown by helicopter to Budapest after the sludge "burned him to the bone."

Firefighters and soldiers wearing masks, rubber boots and other protective gear waded through the stricken area Tuesday, flushing away the sludge with hoses, aided by dozens of bulldozers, their loaders scraping the polluted ground.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban acknowledged that authorities were caught off guard by the disaster, telling reporters the alumina plant and reservoir had been inspected two weeks earlier and no irregularities had been found.

Red sludge is a byproduct of the refining of bauxite into alumina, the basic material for manufacturing aluminum. Representatives from industry organizations in the U.S. and London could not explain why the Hungarian victims were burned by the material, saying if it is properly treated it is not hazardous.

It is common to store treated sludge in ponds where the water eventually evaporates, leaving behind a dried red clay-like soil, the officials said.

However, Hungarian environmentalist Gergely Simon said the sludge involved in the disaster had been accumulating in the reservoir for decades and was extremely alkaline, with a pH value of about 13 — nearly equivalent to lye — and that is what caused the burns.

MAL Rt., the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company that owns the Ajka plant, said that according to European Union standards, red sludge is not considered hazardous waste.

The company also denied that it should have taken more precautions to shore up the reservoir, a huge structure more than 1,000 feet long and 500 yards wide, and high enough to dwarf trees that survived the torrent.

Clearly angered by the company's suggestions that the substance was not hazardous, Interior Minister Sandor Pinter, snapped: "They should take a swim in it and then they'll see."

This week's spill threatened to eclipse the environmental damage caused 10 years ago, when huge amounts of cyanide poured from a gold mine reservoir in a Romanian town near the Hungarian border into the Danube and four smaller rivers, destroying plant and animal life. Romania, what was then Yugoslavia and Ukraine also were affected.

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Gorondi reported from Budapest. Associated Press Writer George Jahn in Vienna and Business Writer Jon Fahey contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS New approach. Corrects spelling of Kolontar. AP Video.)

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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