The European Commissioner for the Environment Margot Wallstrom is to visit Hungary and Romania today, in response to the continuing pollution crisis in the river Danube. Earlier this month, cyanide-tainted water leaked from a gold mine in Northern Romania into the Tusza river, which flows into the Danube. Tonnes of fish in Hungary and Yugoslavia have been killed, and neighbouring countries fear that drinking water has been seriously affected.
Residents of Baia-Mare, whose town still wreaks of cyanide two weeks after a devastating leak at a nearby mine, say there are fish floating in their wells, and accuse the local authorities of not admitting the full scale of the damage in the region caused by the spill six kilometres from the town. A senior Romanian official said today that the cyanide spill from a gold mine in Romania was not the cause of the death of tons of fish in the Danube and its tributaries.
He said that laboratory reports showed that excessive use of bleach used to dilute cyanide was the key cause of the destruction. The Romanian Public Health Agency, admits that, in some wells, the cyanide content is five to seven times over the accepted limit, and in others, it is as high as 50 times the norm.
Pollution is nothing new in Northern Romania. All the residents of the northern suburbs of Baia-Mare, where there is a lead factory, are all suffering from lead poisoning or tuberculosis and child mortality rates are extremely high. The Baia-Mare region was plundered under the communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu for its metals, without any attempt to protect the environment.
