Red Mud in Hungary

In October 5th of 2010, Hungary declared emergency state in three different counties (Kolontár and Devecser) due to a huge chemical leak on the previous day. The chemical that leaked was the “red mud”, a residue from the aluminum industry mining, generated from the refining of bauxite for alumina production (Al2O3).

Under Hungarian law, the cabinet has the right to declare a state of emergency for a period of two weeks. The parliament is required to vote to expand the direction. And that’s exactly what happened on Monday, the 19th. Parliament voted to retain the state of emergency in the three counties until the end of the year.

This red mud is usually kept in ponds or lakes specially designed for that purpose and it contains substances like lead, iron, titanium, sodium hydroxide, silica and aluminum, therefore, it is very dangerous and toxic. Some of the health problems it can cause are chemical burns, dangerous because they are not immediately visible or felt and may be very deep and only seem superficial. The only way to prevent burns in case of contact with the substance is to rinse it thoroughly with water.

The spill was caused by a hole of over 25 meters in a tank factory. The deluge came from a 10-hectare storage pool.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the worst chemical accident in Hungary’s history, according to the state secretary for the environment ministry, Zoltan Illés. At least nine people died and 100 are injured and 50 are hospitalized.

The flood happened 102.53 miles (165Km) from the capital, Budapest. The flood is estimated at about one million cubic meters in a 40km² area (about 9884 ac) and it forced about 500 residents to evacuate.

The flood got 2 meters high in the city of Kolontár, the one that got more affected. Most of those people will not return home because the environmental hazard is too great and nobody could guarantee their safety.

The spills will affect not only the waterways, but also the agriculture. Part of the soil will have to be removed along with the plaster on the outside of resident’s homes unless the mud is thoroughly washed off. Residents have been advised to not eat from crops that came into contact with the mud.

Despite the efforts in spreading vinegar, calcium nitrates and magnesium nitrates through the Marcal River and others in an effort to neutralize the highly corrosive mud and keep it from reaching the Danube river,  the chemicals reached it two days after the spills started. The Danube river is the biggest river in Europe. It cuts 6 other countries: Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Moldova. Also to neutralize the alkalinity of the contaminated areas, authorities poured gypsum over the land.

The emergency crews launched from airplanes plaster and acid in the Danube river and its tributaries to neutralize the effects of toxic alcaline sludge and avoid heavy metals and alkaline substances to travel downstream.

At least the mud’s PH dropped from 13 (which is very alcaline and dangerous) to 9.2. However, the normal no higher than 8.

On Saturday (Oct, 9th), a new crack of 47 cm wide ( aprox. 18 inches) was discovered in one of the walls. That was a threat of a new toxic spill. Illés declaired that a new spill was “inevitble” and a 600 metres barrier is being built to prevent a new runoff. Four thousand people and three hundred machines are working to prevent another tragedy. There are still 2.5 million tons of toxic waste remaining in the tank damaged.

The red mud is part of tailings group, resulted by mineral extraction industry  through ores process and, therefore, composed of very thin particles that contained the mineral of interest or is the result from grinding of rocks.

The cause of the spill is still not known, however, there is a possibility that it might have been a human error because there’s no evidence that would suggest any natural cause.

The Company

The aluminum factory responsible for the spill is MAL Magyar Alumínium, and it’s located in the city of Ajka.

Initially, the company was private, and it’s managing director was Zoltan Bakonyi’s, whose father father, Arpad Baconyi owns 30 percent of MAL’s shares. Bakonyi son was the one to say that the mud was not toxic but that people “should not bathe in it,” while reassuring journalists about the negative impact it might have on MAL’s accounts.

Bakonyi was taken into custody for interrogation on the 11th and released on the 13th, when the judge ruled against charging him. The prosecutors couldn’t find elements enough to charge him formally.

He was charged with criminal negligence leading to a public catastrophe, suspicion of lack of warnings and rescue plans in case of accidents, death of people and environmental damage. The prosecution will appeal the court decision. If convicted, he could face a sentence of up to 10 years.

According to the Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the government took over Mal Zrt and the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company for the next two years. The hungarian parliament decided for the nacionalization with 366 against one and only 13  abstentions. MAL will now be directed by György Bakondi, head of the Hungarian civil protection and firefighter general and will report directly to the prime minister.

Zoltan Illés said the company might have a 73 million euro fine. However, with the nacionalization of the company it’s important to establish who will take over the costs, if the Estate, therefore, citizens, or the stakeholders. The Government said that since it wasn’t a “natural tragedy” but caused by “negligence”, it won’t be the ”taxpayers to bear the costs, but those responsible for the disaster.

MAL is being accused of violating safety rules. They might have overloaded the reservoir causing a rupture in one of the tanks.

Even though the exact cause of the accident hasn’t been determined yet, the production at the alumina plant started on Oct 15th, eleven days after it started because, according to Orban, it’s in the public interest and necessary to save the jobs of thousands of workers.

A third official of the company was questioned on the 19th. Identified as Mrs. Jozsef F. The National Bureau of Investigation, she was in charge of the facility’s laboratory and environmental issues and had failed to design defensive measures to protect the lives and property of residents in case of a disaster.

Mrs. Jozsef is a suspect under the charges of endangerment and causing environmental damage.

According to Bakondi, (the new director, not Bakonyi the former chairmen)  there’s a need to reactivativate the power plant that fuels the plant because leaving it to cool would damage billion forints (Hungary’s official currency), and the government has a preliminary permission to do it. The power plant was reactivated on Friday, 15th, eleven days after the spills started.

People

Like I’ve said before, the residents were forced to evacuate and leave to family and friends houses in nearby places or improvised shelters in schools and stadiums.

In the village of Devecser, which has a population of 5,000, at least 220 families have been rendered homeless by the mud. The village has trains and buses prepared to evacuate the population.

The situation of Kolontar village is the very worse because it’s the closest to the tank. The village was reopened on Wednesday (Oct, 6th) to allow people to get in and look for their belongings, however, the threat of a new spill interrupted the proccess.

The saddest thing about all this is the fact that these people lost not only all their belongings but their money as well. Since hungarians don’t trust much the banking system, some might have kept all their savings at home.

For those overseas who wish to help the victims a  fund (Magyar Alap Kármentő abroad) to help victims of environmental disaster was announced and people all over the world can send donations.

Help the victims of the toxic flood!

If you can help the people of the affected Devecser and Kolontár please don”t hesitate! Send your donation to official bank account of the Hungarian Red Cross.For targeted donation don’t forget fill subject field: “ISZAP“. IBAN: HU37 1040 5004 0002 6547 0000 0000  SWIFT: OKHBHUHB For detailed information please visit the official website of the Hungarian Red Cross! Unfortunatelly, this was the only website I found about the Fund… and it’s in Hungarian…

Here you can find a previous post about water pollution where you will know a little bit about the possible consequences of the accident for people and the environment.

This video shows images of the flood and the flooded areas:

This video shows the rescue team trying to clean the houses and the streets and remove the cars:

Here you see a video of the flood and people trying to wash away the mud with high pressure water.

Rescue workers said many people had suffered burns and eye irritation from the corrosive elements in the mud.

 

Let’s just give it a thought..

Disasters like this one in Hungary gives us the oportunity to think a little bit of our life style. MAL’s responsible because it was their reservoir that spilled. We dont know yet the exact causes yet, it could have been human error, natural cause or a mix of things. That is still a little too early to say. However, it’s important to think of people and the environment first, to have those as focus instead of “finding who to blame”.

Once ANY disaster or problem happens, it doesn’t really matter what/who caused it. Yes, it IS crucial to understand what happened in order to prevent future accidents, but what I’m saying is just that it’s more important to find out a way to fix the problem, no matter what it takes or whom it hurts, than to point fingers and decide who’s responsible for them.

People and environment should come first even if it means that someone or some company should pay for something they dont think they should take fully responsibility for. Sometimes, accidents are caused by multiple factors and it’s impossible to know exactly who is responsible for what and put all that in numbers. Therefore, the biggest matter is to fix the problem and try to stop and prevent greater damage. I’m saying this based on the Brazilian Environmental Law.

So consequences apart, let’s think about the causes. Following the trace of thought above, yes, MAL is responsible for the accident. However, we, as consumers, also have our little part to blame. We all use aluminum on our everyday life. From the cars we drive to the sodas we drink, imitation jewelry, details on clothes shoes and clothing accessories among others. We’re all in contact with alluminum and never think of how it got to us, what kinds of processes it had to go through to get to our hands as we know it, as well as how much did it cost to the Earth and other people to get to us. No, that environmental and social aspect of the product is usually not taken into consideration when it’s price is estipulated.

Therefore, as consumers, it’s important that we aknowledge the social and environmental cost of the products we buy and take that in consideration when purchasing. Yes, recycling can diminish the natural recources extraction. However, recycling alone won’t solve the problem of waste and natural resources consumption if people keep buying just as much or even more than usual.

Water Pollution

The quantity and distribution of fresh water pose one set of environmental and social challenge. Safeguarding the quality of water involves another collection of environmental and human health dilemmas. Developed nations have made admirable advances in clearing up water pollution over the past few decades. Still, the World Commission on Water recently concluded that over half the world’s major rivers are “seriously depleted and polluted, degrading and poisoning the surrounding ecosystems, threatening the health and livelihood of people who depend on them”.

The term pollution describes the release of matter or energy into the environment that causes undesirable impact on the health and well-being of people or other organisms. Pollution can affect water, air or soil, and can be:

• Physical  – scientists use temperature, color and turbidity, which measures the density of suspended particles in a water sample. Fast-moving rivers that cut through arid or eroded landscapes, such as the Colorado River, carry a great deal of sediment and are turbid and muddy-looking as a result. If scientists can measure only one parameter, they will often choose turbidity, because it tends to correlate with many others and is thus a good indicator of overall water quality.
• Chemical –nutrients concentrations, pH, taste and odor, and hardness. Hard water contains high concentrations of calcium and magnesium ions, prevents soap from lathering, and leaves chalky deposits behind when heated or boiled. An important characteristic is dissolved oxygen content, which is an indicator of aquatic ecosystem health because surface waters that are low in dissolved oxygen support less aquatic life.
• Biological – is the presence of fecal coliform bacteria, which indicates contamination by human waste and suggest the presence of other disease-causing organisms. Scientists can identified biological pollution using algae and aquatic invertebrates.

 

Water pollution comes in many forms and can cause diverse impacts on aquatic ecosystems and human health:

• Nutrient pollution – is the pollution from fertilizers and other sources that can lead to eutrophication and hypoxia in coastal marine areas.

• Pathogens and waterborne diseases – disease-causing organisms (pathogenic viruses, protists, and bacteria) can enter drinking water supplies when these are contaminated with human waste or with animal waste from feedlots. Biological pollution by pathogens causes more human health problems than any other type of water pollution. Treating sewage constitutes one approach for reducing health risks. Another is using chemical or other means to disinfect drinking water. Personal hygiene is vital, as is government enforcement of regulations to ensure the cleanliness of food production, processing, and distribution.

• Toxic chemicals – our waterways have become polluted with toxic organic substances of our own making, including pesticides, petroleum products, and other synthetic chemicals. Many of these can poison animal and plants, alter aquatic ecosystems, and cause an array of human health problems, including cancer. Toxic metals such as arsenic, lead, and mercury, as well as acids from acid precipitation and from acid drainage from mining sites, also cause negative impacts on human health and the environment. Legislation and enforcing stricter regulations of industry can help reduce releases of toxic chemicals. We can also modify our industrial process and our purchasing decisions to rely less on these substances.

• Sediment – floods build fertile farmland, but sediment that rivers transport can also impair aquatic ecosystems. Mining, clear cutting, overgrazing, land clearing for housing development, and tilling of farm fields all expose soil to wind and water erosion. Some water bodies, such as the Colorado River and China’s Yellow River, are naturally sediment-rich, but many others are not. When a clear-water river receives a heavy influx of eroded sediment, aquatic habitat can change dramatically, and fish adapted to clear-water environments may not be able to adjust. We can reduce sediment pollution by better managing farms and forests and by avoiding large-scale disturbance of vegetation.

• Thermal pollution – water’s ability to hold dissolved oxygen decreases as temperature rises, so some aquatic organisms may die when human activities heat water. When we withdraw water from a river and use it to cool an industrial facility, we transfer heat energy from the facility back into the river where the water is returned. The temperature might also be raised by removing streamside vegetation that shades water. Too little heat can also cause problems.  On the Colorado and other dammed rivers, water at the bottoms of reservoirs is colder than water at the surface. When dam operators release water from the depths of a reservoir, downstream water temperatures drop suddenly. In the Colorado’s system, these low water temperatures have favored cold-loving invasive trout over and endangered native species of suckerfish.

Environmental Health

Among many aspects, environmental health is the examination of the impacts of human-made chemicals on wildlife and people. It’s study and practice allows us to understand the environmental factors that influence human health and quality of life. People who work with it seek to prevent adverse effects on human health and ecological systems.

There are many different types of environmental health threat, or hazard, around us. Some of those are risks that we cannot avoid, however, there is also some amount of risk that can be avoided by taking precautions. Environmental health consists of taking steps to minimize the impacts of hazards and the risks of encoutering them. Here I’m going to talk a little bit about some of them, but focuse more on the chemical ones.

Physical hazards - are the natural hazard previously mentioned on the last post. Therefore, they are processes that occur naturally like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, fires, floods, blizzards, landslides, hurricanes, and droughts, but they also include ongoing natural phenomena, like ultraviolet (UV) radiation from sunlight, which can cause skin cancer, cataracts, and immune suppression in case of excessive exposure.

Practices like increase our vulnerability to some physical hazards:

• Deforesting slopes makes landslides more likely;
• Channelizing rivers makes flooding more likely in some areas while preventing flooding in others. For more information about this, click here.

The risk over these practices can be reduced by improving our forestry and flood control practices; by choosing not to build in areas prone to floods, landslides, fires, and coastal waves. For hazards like exposure to UV light, the risk can be reduced by using clothing and sunscreen to shield our skin from intense sunlight.

Biological hazards - result from ecological interaction among organisms. They consist on bacterial or virus infection or other pathogeny. This is infectious disease, and they are also called communicable or transmissible disease. Infectious diseases like malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, and influenza are considered environmental health hazards. Like the other two types of hazards, it’s impossible to avoid risks from biological agents, however, steps can be taken to reduce the likelihood of infection.

Cultural or lifestyle hazards- result from the place we live, our socioeconomic status, occupation, or behavioral choices. Choosing to smoke cigarettes or living or working with people who do, increases our risk of lung cancer. Choosing to smoke is a personal behavioral decision, but exposure to secondhand smoke may not be under one’s control. The same thing can be said for drug use, diet and nutrition, crime and mode of transportation. Advocates of environmental justice argue that such health factors as living in proximity to toxic waste sites or working unprotected with pesticides might be correlated with socioeconomic deprivation.

Chemical hazards – include the many synthetic chemicals produced by our society like disinfectants, pesticides and the compounds that contribute to reproductive problems on animals. Chemicals produced naturally by organisms can also be hazardous.

Despite diseases like cancer, heart disease, and respiratory disorders have genetic bases, they are also influenced by environmental factors. Asthma, for instance, is influenced by genes, but also by environmental conditions. As a matter of fact, pollutants from fossil fuels combustion makes it worse. Children raised on farms suffer less asthma than those raised in cities.

Malnutrition can foster many different illnesses, just like poverty and poor hygiene. Lifestyle choices can affect risks of acquiring som noninfectious diseases, just like smoking can lead to lung cancer and lack of exercise, to heart disease. Infectious diseases are responsible for 26%, nearly 15 milion deaths, that occur worldwide per year. Some pathogenic microbes attack us directly, whereas other times infection occurs through a vector, which is an organism that transfers the pathogen to the host. When it comes to infectious diseases there is a gap between the number of deaths in developed nations and the developing countries; differences in hygiene conditions and access to medicine makes infectious diseases be responsible for almost half of all deaths in developings, while there are very few deaths in developed nations.

Even though public health efforts have lessened the impact of infectious disease in developed nations, some cases like the West Nile Virus, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), avian flu and influenza. Other diseases like tuberculosis and malaria are evolving resistance to antibiotics. There are also some tropical diseases like malaria, dengue, cholera and yellow fever that might expand into the temperade zone with global climate change. Also, habitat alteration can affect the abundance, distribution, and movement of certain disease vectors.

There are some cases in which chemicals are used to fight diseases, even though they’re also hazardous to our health. This happens in Africa, where the pesticide DDT is used to kill the mosquitos that transmit malaria, because they’re considered to be a health threat greater than DDT.

Curiosity:

It was only on the 60s that people began to learn about the risks of exposure to pesticides. The publication of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, was the key event that brought the pesticide dichlorodiphenyl-tricholoroethane (DDT) to public’s attention.

Synthetic Chemical

Synthetic chemicals are widely present in our environment, in fact, many of them have found their way into soil, air and water. A 2002 study by the US Geological Survey found that 80% of the US streams contain at least trace amounts of 82 wastewater contaminants, including antibiotics, detergents, drugs, steroids, plasticizers, disinfectants, solvents and perfumes, among other substances. The pesticides used to kill insects and weeds on farms, lawns, and golf courses are some of our most widespread synthetic chemicals. Because of this huge exposure, we carry traces of numerous industrial chemicals in our bodies.

Since not all synthetic chemicals pose health risks, and few are known as toxicants, we shouldn’t necessarily be alarmed. However, among the roughly 100,000 synthetic chemicals on the market today, few have been tested for harmful effects; therefore, we just do not know what are the effects, if any, so much different chemicals might cause to our organism.

Toxicants

Toxicants are not evenly distributed in the environment, and they move about in specific ways. Water, for example, carries toxicants from large areas of land and concentrates them in small volumes of surface water. Those chemicals that can persist in soil can leach down into groundwater and contaminate drinking water supplies. Many chemicals are soluble in water and enter organism’s tissues through drinking or absorption. That’s the main reason why aquatic animals like fish, frogs and stream invertebrates are effective indicators of pollution. Whenever scientists find low concentrations of pesticides exerting harm on frogs, fish, and invertebrates, they view this as a warning that people could be next. Toxicants might cause reproductive problems on animals and humans. 

The contaminants that wash into streams and rivers flow and seep into the water we drink and drift through the air we breathe.

The substances that can be transported by air makes the toxicological effect occur far from the site of direct chemical use. Airbone transport of pesticides is also called pesticide drift. This problem can be seen in the Central Valley of California, where irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides are used intensively. Dust particles containing pesticide residue and are transported by the wind for long distance and affected four species of frog in the mountains of Sierra Nevada.

Toxic agents may degrade quickly and become harmless, or may remain unaltered and persist for months, years or decades. The rate at the chemicals degradation depends on factors like temperatura, moisture and sun exposure, and how these factors interact with the chemistry of the toxicant. Those toxicans that persist in the environment have the greatest potential to harm organisms over long periods of time. In fact people are concerned about DDT and PCBs because of their long persistence time. 

There are natural toxicants that are also unhealthy and may cause us harm. However, scientists are still debating how much risk natural toxicants pose.

Hazards

In this post I’m not going to talk about the consequences of the climate change, but how hazards impacts can be reduced or mitigated, and also what we do to make them worse.

Even though they have many causes, in a broad way, hazards can termed into:

• Natural or physical- caused by a natural process. Include obvious hazards like earthquakes, landslides, fires, droughts, blizzards, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hurricanes and flooding;

• Man-made – created by human negligence, error, or system failure, which includes an array of possibilities that goes from immediate hazards such as dam failure or shipping accidents and global warming, even though it is not believed by scientists called skeptics.

 

Besides the geological hazards such as earthquakes, volcanoes, peole face other types of natural hazards that result from conditions in the hydrosphere, atmosphere, or biosphere. Flooding, caused by heavy rains, ravage low-lying areas near rivers and streams; coastal erosion eat away at beaches; wildfire threaten life and property in fire-prone areas; tornadoes and hurricanes can cause extensive damage and loss of life.

Even though tose are “natural hazards”, the magnitude of their impacts upon us depend on choices we make. We can make those impacts be worse in various ways:

• Population growth makes people live in areas susceptible to natural disasters;
• Many people choose to live in areas that seem to be attractive but are also prone to hazards. Coastlines are vulnerable to tsunamis and erosion by storms; mountainous areas may feature volcanoes and mass-wasting events;
• Engineer landscapes can increase the frequency or severity of natural hazards. Damming and diking rivers to control floods can lead to floodings; suppressing natural wildfire puts forests at risk of larger fires; mining practices like clear cutting on slopes can induce mass wasting, speed runoff, compact soil and change drainage patterns;
•  Earth’s climate changed by emitting greenhouse gases alter patterns of precipitation, increasing risks of drought, fire, flooding, and mudslides locally and regionally. Rising sea levels induced by global warming increase coastal erosion. Some research suggests that warming ocean temperatures may increase the power and duration of hurricanes.

We can also mitigate or reduce the hazards impacts by:

•  Using technology, engineering, and policy, informed by a solid understanding of geology and ecology. There are building earthquake-resistant structures;
• Designing early warning systems for tsunamis and volcanoes;
• Conserving coastal forests, reefs and salt marshes protect against tsunamis and coastal erosion;
• Better forestry and mining practices can help prevent landslides;
• Zoning regulations, building codes, and insurance incentives that discourage development in areas prone to landslides, floods, fires and storm surges can keep us out of harm’s way and decrease taxpayer expense cleaning up after natural disasters;
• Mitigating global climate change may help reduce the frequency of natural hazards in many regions. 

*Source book: Essential Environment, The Science Behind the Stories, by Jay Withgott and Scott Brennan – 3rd edt.