Hungary declared a state of emergency yesterday after a toxic mud spill that swamped villages killed four people and injured 120 in what officials said was the country’s worst-ever chemical accident.
Eight injured were in a serious condition and six people were missing after the walls of a reservoir of residue at an aluminium plant broke on Monday afternoon. Officials feared the death toll could rise.
Three villages were swamped with 1.1 million cubic metres of toxic red sludge from the reservoir in Ajka, 165 kilometres west of Budapest.
“It’s an ecological catastrophe,” said environment state secretary Zoltan Illes, who visited the area yesterday, describing it as the worst-ever chemical accident in Hungary.
The interior ministry called a state of emergency in the counties of Veszprem, Gyor-Moson-Sopron and Vas.
Among the dead were two children – aged three and one, said Karoly Tily, the mayor of one of the affected villages, Kolontar.
A 25-year-old man was killed when his car was overturned by the flood and an elderly man died in his home, said disaster relief team chief Gyorgy Bakondi.
The injured included eight policemen, eight firefighters and a soldier, and 62 people were hospitalised. Reports said the injuries included burns.
Up to 40 square kilometres of land were affected and there were fears that some of the sludge had already found its way into the Marcal river, potentially polluting the connecting Raba and Danube rivers.
The sludge could reach the Danube in four or five days, said the deputy chief of the water management company for western Hungary, Sandor Toth.
“From the point of view of water management, it’s a catastrophe,” Mr Toth said.
Scientists say the sludge could destroy the ground and plants it touches, and fish would perish if it made its way into rivers.
To prevent pollution, army helicopters dropped neutralising agents into the Marcal, Mr Illes said.
The red mud is a toxic residue left over from aluminium production and contains harmful substances such as lead as well as highly corrosive elements.
The production of a tonne of aluminium generates nearly three tonnes of the sludge.
The owners of the reservoir, the Hungarian Aluminium Production and Trade Company (MAL), said it had started repair work on the damaged tanks to prevent further spills.
In a statement, MAL said that even after the spill, up to 98 per cent of the red sludge was still in the reservoir.
The environment state secretary said MAL had appeared to continue production even after the spill and there was suspicion that more red sludge had been stored in the reservoir than was allowed, or that the containers had not been sufficiently fitted.
MAL had been ordered to suspend production with immediate effect, he said.
But the company said an on-site inspection was carried out on the day of the accident “and the latest analysis of the water sample taken at the slurry wall revealed no signs of an impeding catastrophe,”
It insisted that, under European Union guidelines, red sludge is not considered hazardous waste and its components were not water-soluble.
“According to the daily and annual checks, everything was working fine, so we would like to wait until the end of the official investigation (to find out what went wrong),” MAL chief Zoltan Bakonyi told a news conference.
Interior Minister Sandor Pinter, who also visited Kolontar, said there was no immediate danger of further spillages.