Environmental Health v Economic Health

February 10, 2000 (ENS) - A spill from an Australian-Romanian gold processor's facility is being blamed for widening environmental devastation in Romania and neighboring Hungary. The spill from the Aural Gold smelter's Baia Mare tailings dam in northeastern Romania is said to have occurred on January 30, but reports of its effects have only now begun to reach the West.

A company statement said heavy snows caused an overflow of a dam wall. Waste water containing cyanide flowed into the adjacent Lapus River, then entered the Somes River, and crossed the border into Hungary, before reaching the Tisza River, one of eastern Europe's largest.

A Hungarian government official said a carpet of dead fish had covered the Tisza and contaminated drinking water for 2.5 million people.
"This is the first, most serious environmental catastrophe in the 21st century," a Hungarian Foreign Affairs spokesman, Gabor Horvath, told Australian ABC news. The Hungarian government has banned all contact with the rivers.

Horvath said packaged water is being distributed for people and stock. Some rare species have been exterminated, and many tonnes of dead fish lay as a "velvet carpet" on the Tisza, where a barrage of barges has been used to contain them.

People and livestock in a series of towns and cities bordering the Tisza River can make no use of its water, he said. There were no reports of human fatalities or illness.

A Romanian government official said the cyanide level was 700 times above permissable levels in the Somes near the spill site, and about 200 times permissable maximum where it entered Hungary.

Read what Australian enviromentalists say.

What is cyanide?