Serbia to take legal action on cyanide spill

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Serbia to take legal action as cyanide pollution spreads

By MISHA SAVIC

BECEJ, Yugoslavia (February 13, 2000 8:56 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - Serbia said Sunday that it will seek compensation at an international court from those responsible for a cyanide spill that contaminated a major river, destroying most aquatic life.

The spill in the Tisa River, which originated in Romania, apparently sunk to non-lethal levels Sunday after reaching the Danube. Before that, however, it had devastated the river in Hungary and Serbia. Serbian Environment Minister Branislav Blazic said it would take at least five years for life in the Tisa to recover.

Blazic accused Romania of covering up the real dimensions of the poisoning, which some environmentalists say could be the biggest ecological catastrophe in Europe since the Chernobyl nuclear reactor catastrophe in 1986.

"The Tisa has been killed. Not even bacteria have survived," Blazic said as he toured the area along the river in northern Serbia. "This is a total catastrophe."

"We will demand an estimation of the damage and we will demand that the culprits for this tragedy be punished," he said.

Romania played down the environmental damage. But people - not just aquatic life - are at risk because of the spill, said Predrag Prolic, a professor of chemistry and toxicology at Belgrade University.

He said those with wells close to the riverbed are in danger. Birds feeding off fish could die, he said. The poisoned water also can filter into the soil and then contaminate grass, grain, and livestock, Prolic said.

Serbian Agriculture Minister Jovan Babovic said Sunday that after the toxic waste entered the Danube, the concentration of cyanide dropped below 0.2 milligrams per liter, a non-lethal level. But the Beta news agency cited eyewitnesses who said the that the Danube was "all white with the bellies of dead fish" between the spot where it joins the Tisa and Belgrade, about 50 miles to the southeast. The fish were possibly washed down from the Tisa.

In Bucharest, Romania, environmental official Anton Vlad suggested the spill's effects had been overstated.

"I have the impression that it is exaggerated," Vlad told national radio.

The cyanide spill originated in northwest Romania, near the border town of Oradea, where a dam at the Baia Mare gold mine overflowed Jan. 30, causing cyanide to pour into streams. At the mine, a cyanide solution is used to separate gold ore from surrounding rock.

From there, the polluted water flowed west into the Tisa in neighboring Hungary, killing large numbers of fish there, and then into Yugoslavia.

Prolic said the peak concentration of cyanide in the river was 20 times the permissible level. Poisonous heavy metals such as lead can be left behind after the cyanide dissipates and can also leech into the soil, he said.

In Serbia, dozens of volunteers and fisherman wearing protective rubber gloves removed hundreds of dead fish from the Tisa to bury them. Heaps of fish littered the river bank.

Experts and officials estimate that some 80 percent of the fish in the Tisa have died since the contamination entered the country Friday.

"Everything's dead, cyanide destroyed the entire food chain," said local fisherman Slobodan Krkljes, 43. "Fishing was my job. I don't know what I'm going to do now."

In Becej, a town on the Tisa about 55 miles north of Belgrade, police were making sure no contaminated fish were brought to the town's market for sale. Restaurants in the region have removed fish from their menus.

Adding to the problem, the fertile plains of Serbia's north are the country's breadbasket. Water from the Tisa is traditionally used for irrigation.

Blazic claimed the initial concentration of the cyanide in Romania must have been enormous if the effects remained so deadly in Yugoslavia, about 300-400 miles down the river.

"Had we from Yugoslavia done something like this, we probably would have been bombed," he said.

Blazic was referring to that NATO bombing of Yugoslavia last year over its actions in Kosovo - and a widespread belief here that the West is anti-Serb. The cyanide spill adds to the ecological damage caused by NATO's bombing of Serbian oil refineries and factories.

http://www.nandotimes.com/global/story/0,1024,500167839-500214249-501002446-0,00.html

see also

http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002YE4

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 13, 2000


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