By Robert Hodgson, DPA/Budapest
It has been one year since Hungary was hit by its worst man-made environmental disaster, when over 1mn cubic metres of caustic red slurry spilled from an aluminium ore refinery leaving death and destruction in its wake.
Defence Minister Csaba Hende (second left) and Interior Minister Sandor Pinter (second right) take part in a commemoration at a memorial in Kolontar
Remembrance ceremonies were held yesterday in Kolontar and Devecser, the worst-hit villages, and politicians and dignitaries gathered for the inauguration of memorials to the victims.
In Devecser a new community centre and post office were opened, and the words of local mayor Tamas Toldi recalled the scale of the spill.
He described as his “first shocking experience” October 4 last year seeing the red sludge flowing through the streets at above window height past the town’s old post office, the state news agency MTI reported.
Shortly after noon that day, a 30m-high wall of a vast waste storage pool at MAL Hungarian Aluminium’s bauxite processing plant in Ajka collapsed without warning.
And Devecser, home to almost 5,000, is a full 4km from the aluminium plant. The smaller village of Kolontar, lies less than 1km away from the collapsed reservoir wall.
There, a low-lying area of town has disappeared, the polluted remains of homes having been bulldozed during the clean up.
Many said the final death toll could have been far higher had it occurred at night when residents of nearby villages were asleep. As it was, 10 were killed and about 120 people needed hospital treatment, mostly for chemical burns.
Over 300 homes had to be demolished. Families have already been rehoused in over 100 new homes in estates built on higher ground. Others took up the offer of financial compensation and resettled either locally or further afield.
Thousands of tonnes of topsoil have been removed from some 800 hectares of farmland that were left under a thick layer of toxic red silt.
Angry residents want to know who was to blame for the spill, but that is still an open question, legally speaking.
The head of a parliamentary committee set up to look into the causes said this week that it was clearly an “industrial and not a natural disaster”.
Hungary’s Central Bureau of Investigation has already questioned as suspects over a dozen MAL staff members, mostly senior or middle managers.
“Those responsible for the disaster must be named and punished, we owe this to the victims, local residents and justice,” interior ministry official Karoly Kontrat said in Kolontar at a memorial gathering.
For many locals, however, there is also anxiety over the fate of the firm behind the accident.
The Ajka plant resumed operation under temporary state control within a fortnight of the spill, reflecting the fact that – particularly for a country struggling to recover from a deep recession – it is too big to fail.
MAL is currently appealing against an unprecedented fine of 135bn forints ($598mn) imposed by the regional environmental authorities in September.
The government says that it will do “everything necessary” to ensure the continued operation of a facility that employs some 1,200 and is indirectly responsible for the livelihoods of up to 6,000.
“The state is in continuous contact with the management of the company, and since February ... has conducted intensive negotiations with the owners regarding possible ownership restructuring,” the ministry of public administration said after the fine was announced.
Since the spill, the Ajka plant has switched to a safer “dry” method of refining bauxite into alumina, and the government says it is now safe.
However, as Hungary pauses to take stock and the residents of Kolontar, Devecser and nearby Somlovasarhely look back over a largely successful year-long struggle to return to normal life, some were ringing alarm bells.
MAL’s bauxite refinery was not the only industrial plant bequeathed to the eastern half of Europe by the communist powers that held sway until 1989.
“A year after the disaster at Kolontar, and 10 years after a cyanide spill from (gold mines in) Baie Mare in Romania, we still do not know what other time bombs are ticking in the region,” Gabor Figeczky, the director of environmental organisation WWF Hungary, said ominously yesterday.