Watches Toxic sludge spill could happen elsewhere, campaigners warn

Toxic sludge spill could happen elsewhere, campaigners warn



A photo the WWF says was taken of the Hungarian spill site in June, showing "a damaged and clearly leaking sludge pond wall.
(CNN) -- Shocking safety lapses exposed by the deadly Hungary toxic sludge spill could be repeated at thousands of industrial sites around the world unless regulations are tightened dramatically, campaigners have warned.
With eight people dead so far and hundreds of villagers evacuated near an aluminium plant at Ajka, 160 kilometers (100 miles) west of Budapest, experts said they believed the spillage of 1,000,000 cubic meters of toxic red sludge from a ruptured dam was a disaster waiting to happen.
The WWF on Monday published a photo taken, the environmental pressure group said, in June and showing one of the pools of sludge -- a by-product of the process to turn bauxite ore into aluminium oxide -- clearly leaking, indicating that the disaster three months later could have been avoided.
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The aluminum company, MAL Co., said in a statement Saturday it had performed extensive maintenance work and renovations in the past decade and had followed safety regulations. The company was also now working to construct dams and defense lines in an attempt to minimize damage, it said.
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On Monday, investigators arrested the company's chief executive Zoltan Bakonyi on charges of public endangerment and harming the environment.
Greenpeace said it would be some time before the full effects of the disaster were known. "We're very concerned by this. Regionally it's a huge disaster," Bernhard Obermayr, the environmental campaign group's campaigns director for central and eastern Europe, told CNN.
"Villages near the spillage won't recover from this. The sludge is highly toxic, containing arsenic and mercury, both of which can cause cancer and affect the body's nervous system. Those chemicals go into the ground water and will spread throughout the whole Danube region. At least 50 tons of arsenic have entered the eco-system we believe."
Obermayr added that there were thousands more toxic hot spots throughout central and eastern Europe, China, Africa and Latin America. "We've seen what can happen with a big disaster like Hungary, but globally, in emerging economies, disasters are happening all the time that are not reported. There is a constant leakage of dangerous chemicals from mining sites -- not just one big bang like this."
In the European Union, he said, industrial safety stan
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Watch Hungary says clean-up of toxic spill could take a year

Hungary says clean-up of toxic spill could take a year


Budapest: A damburst of toxic sludge that killed at least four people and left scores needing treatment for chemical burns and other injuries could take up to a year to clean up, officials said on Wednesday.

"The clean-up and reconstruction could take months, even a year," Environment Secretary Zoltan Illes said.

On Monday, the retaining walls of a reservoir at an aluminium plant in Ajka in western Hungary collapsed, sending a toxic soup of industrial waste cascading through seven villages.

The devastation spread across an area of 40 square kilometres (15.4 square miles) in what officials say is Hungary's worst-ever chemical accident.



Three adults and one child were killed and 123 people were injured, while three people are still missing.

Karoly Tily, the mayor of Kolontar, the village where all four victims died, declared on Wednesday a day of mourning, and the company which owned the reservoir, the Hungarian Aluminium Production and Trade Company (MAL), said it would foot the costs of the funerals.

Illes told online publication Langlovak in an interview that the overall costs of the clean-up and reconstruction "could reach tens of millions of euros (dollars)”.

If MAL was unable to drum up the funds, "the sum will be borne by the Hungarian government, or it might be necessary to ask the European Union for aid”, he said.

The tidal wave of sludge overturned cars, swept away possessions and raised fears that pollution leeching from it could reach the Danube River, which courses through Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine before flowing into the Black Sea.


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Hungary toxic sludge spill reaches Danube
Late Wednesday, officials said they were confident the contamination would not reach Europe's second longest river

"If our calculations are right then by the time the sludge reaches the Danube contamination will be under the acceptable levels," Emil Jenak, president of Northern Transdanubian Water Management, said.

A pollution expert, quoted by the Hungarian news agency MTI, said rain and neutralising agents used so far had already led to a drop in alkaline levels in the Marcal river "and the connecting Raba will suffer much less damage" than feared.

But environmental organisation Greenpeace detected lead, chrome and arsenic in samples taken from a tributary of the Marcal, the river Torma.
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Pakistan flood recovery could take years

enjoy Pakistan flood recovery could take years




Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari warned his beleaguered nation could take years to recover from devastating floods as global pledges topped 700 million dollars and waters refused to relent.
The near month-long floods have killed 1,500 people and affected up to 20 million nationwide in the country’s worst ever natural disaster, with the threat of disease ever present in the camps sheltering desperate survivors.
“Your guess is as good as mine, but three years is a minimum,” Zardari told reporters on Monday when asked how long it would take Pakistan to go through relief, reconstruction and rehabilitation after the floods.
“I don’t think Pakistan will ever fully recover but we will move on,” the president said, adding the government — under fire for its slow relief response — was working to protect people from similar disasters in future.
Senior US official Dan Feldman, the deputy special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters in Washington that a UN General Assembly meeting last week was “a real galvanising moment” in the aid effort.
“By our count, we’ve seen over 700 million dollars pledged, including our own 150 million dollar commitment, from over 30 countries,” Feldman said, without giving a country-by-country breakdown.
He said there are an “additional 300 million dollars in as yet undefined commitments” from a variety of countries.
The United States has made nuclear-armed Pakistan a key ally in the fight against Islamic extremism with fears militancy could benefit from the instability after the flooding and fury at the government.
Zardari was strongly criticised for failing to cut short a visit to Europe at the start of the disaster and while he defended that decision, he acknowledged that some criticism of the government’s response was justified.
“There will always be a ‘could have been better, would have been better, should have been better’... (but) you have to understand how enormous the issue (the scale of the disaster) is,” he said.
Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from flood-threatened areas in the south since Saturday, including most of the 100,000 residents in the city of Shahdadkot, which authorities were battling to protect.
Dozens of villages around Shahdadkot were inundated, district administration official Yasin Shar told AFP Monday, as floodwaters threatened the city.
Nearly 90 percent of people living in the area had left and the remaining were being rushed out, he said.
Similar efforts were being made to save Hyderabad, a city of 2.5 million people on the lower reaches of the Indus river, where at least 36 surrounding villages have been swept away.
Pakistani officials on Monday began talks with the International Monetary Fund in Washington amid reports Islamabad was asking the fund to ease the terms of a loan worth nearly 11 billion dollars.
Last week Pakistani officials said Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh would ask the IMF to restructure the current loan or consider new financing.
There are fears that losses as a result of the floods could reach 43 billion dollars.
Millions of survivors are in desperate need of food, shelter and clean drinking water and require humanitarian assistance to survive, as concerns grow over potential cholera, typhoid and hepatitis outbreaks.
Disaster management officials say that the scale of the flooding is much larger than Pakistan’s 2005 earthquake, which killed 73,000 people and made 3.3 million homeless.
Maurizio Giuliano, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Islamabad, said that 1.5 million people were being treated for everything from respiratory and skin infections to diarrhoea
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