Europe: Hungary’s tide of toxic sludge

“Nothing can be done to save Kolontár,” said Budapest’s Népszabadság. On Oct. 4, the wall of a storage reservoir containing liquid waste from the Ajka aluminum processing plant in western Hungary collapsed, disgorging nearly 1 million cubic meters of toxic red sludge, which soon inundated nearby villages. The red tide crushed homes, damaged bridges, and even sucked cars clear out of their garages. The village of Kolontár was directly in the path of the deluge; four people died there, including a 3-year-old child. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who visited on Thursday, declared it had become “impossible for people to live here.” Instead, he promised to build a new settlement and a memorial.

This is Hungary’s worst environmental disaster, said The Economist. At least eight people died and 120 were injured—many suffering severe burns after being trapped in the highly corrosive mud, which can “strip off the top layer of skin.” All life in nearby streams and rivers died immediately. Efforts to prevent the poison from reaching the Danube River have been partially successful: Dams were built in tributaries and vast amounts of vinegar and gypsum were poured into the water to neutralize the alkalinity. Even so, huge quantities of toxins, including mercury and arsenic, have been flushed into the Danube basin, and the 15 square miles of mostly agricultural land that was inundated will be unusable indefinitely.

The company that owns the plant, MAL, is calling the accident a “natural disaster” and blaming heavy rain, said Gabor Bartus in Budapest’s Komment.hu. But no one believes that excuse—rainfall has not been exceptional for this time of year—and the government has arrested the plant’s owner and nationalized the company. The EU has stiff regulations against this sort of negligence, but in Hungary we tend not to enforce them. And EU inspectors themselves generally seem more vexed by the untidy way we dispose of household waste than by potential environmental calamities. “Public enemy No. 1,” they keep telling us, is the plastic soft drink bottle. Come again? “Plastic bottles don’t burn skin, destroy houses and railway lines, or make the land barren.” The inspectors’ obsession makes no sense. The elimination of litter may be a worthy goal for highly developed Western nations, but we have far more pressing matters to worry about.

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Central and Eastern Europe are littered with “environmental time bombs,” said Vienna’s Die Presse—including industrial plants and military facilities from the Soviet era. There are at least 21 sites in Hungary alone that officials recently concluded pose an immediate hazard: MAL’s Ajka plant was ranked only 12th among them. The Kolontár disaster underlines the need to take on powerful industrial lobbies over waste disposal, said Brussels’ De Standaard. “All too often, the interests of the majority only become the priority in the wake of a disaster.”