Kolontár dam breach

47,086 17,497Coordinates: 47 ° 5 ′ 9.6 ″ N , 17 ° 29 ′ 49.2 ″ E

Kolontár dam breach

Map of the communities on the Torna stream

The Kolontár dam breach was an environmental disaster that occurred on October 4, 2010 near Kolontár in western Hungary . As a result of this accident 150 people were injured and ten died. 40 square kilometers were affected when around one million cubic meters of red mud flooded the country.

procedure

At about 12:25 p.m. the dam of a landfill basin of the aluminum smelter MAL AG (Magyar Alumínium) in Ajka , which was used to store red mud, broke. As a result, an estimated 600,000 to 1.1 million cubic meters of the corrosive and heavy metal-containing sludge leaked. The mud got into the high water Torna brook and flooded the communities Kolontár , Devecser , Somlóvásárhely , Tüskevár , Apácatorna and Kisberzseny with waves at a height of 1–2 meters . Ten people died as a result of the mud flood, 150 people were injured and 400 people had to be brought to safety. In the affected counties Veszprém , Vas and Győr was emergency proclaimed. According to the government, the flood of mud reached 40 residential buildings and two community buildings in two streets of Kolontár as well as 244 residential buildings in 19 different streets in Devecser and 14 residential buildings in Somlóvásárhely. An area of around 40 square kilometers was directly affected by the leaked mud. Fauna and flora in this area were severely damaged.

On October 9, the head of the regional disaster control ordered the immediate evacuation of the entire village of Kolontár, as the northern dam of the sludge storage basin threatened to collapse completely. If necessary, the neighboring villages would also have to be completely cleared. On October 10, the Hungarian Ministry of the Environment declared another dam breach as inevitable.

On October 10th, the Vienna ZAMG reported that due to the weather conditions, air was also being shipped to eastern Austria. Due to the moist sludge in which the ingredients are bound, contamination of the air masses would not have been to be feared.

activities

In the affected region, 500 aid workers from civil protection and the Hungarian armed forces fought against the spread of the environmental disaster with protective clothing and breathing masks. In addition to water for dilution, hydrochloric acid was also used for neutralization . Thus BorsodChem provided 150,000 liters of hydrochloric acid are available. In order to prevent the mud from spreading further down the river and to bind it, the emergency services dumped around 1,000 tons of gypsum into the Marcal River by Tuesday . For safety reasons, the red mud should also be neutralized with acid in another adjacent landfill basin and vacuumed off. According to initial estimates by the Hungarian government, the time for the clean-up work was forecast to be several months.

The Hungarian authorities initiated criminal proceedings for negligence against unknown persons. Documents from MAL AG were confiscated. The management and individual employees of the company were questioned by the police. On the day after the accident, MAL AG had to stop aluminum production in the Ajka factory by order of the Secretary of State for the Environment, Zoltán Illés .

After the increased pH value had already been determined on the Moson-Danube on October 7, 2010 , Slovakia also ordered water samples from the Danube, which had to be carried out three times a day.

On the same day at 7:36 p.m. Hungary also asked the EU for help through the EU civil protection mechanism . This request was forwarded to all participating member states by the Monitoring and Information Center of the European Union. As a result, five experts from Belgium, Germany, France, Austria and Sweden were sent to Hungary. However, it was not planned to support Hungary with EU funds, as this disaster could not be classified as a natural disaster.

Following a visit to the site of the accident, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that most of the affected areas could no longer be made habitable and that new settlements were being considered for the affected population, while the contaminated area would probably have to be fenced off as a memorial in the long term without attempting to clean it.

The authorities announced in February 2011 that half of the contaminated area had been cleared of the mud. The approximately 400 cubic meters of sludge should be in another basin in order to be neutralized with active ingredients. However, Greenpeace reported an illegal discharge by MAL AG, which would continue to discharge red mud into a stream. The Federal Environment Agency in Vienna presented in investigations massive exceedances especially with arsenic, aluminum solid and organic carbon. The old basin was not repaired, nor would the new basin have free storage space, was criticized. The state was and is also criticized for deliberately overriding a civil protection law in order to legalize this procedure. In addition, numerous EU regulations were not transposed into national law, so that the Hungarian state was also found to be complicit on this side.

Victims and damage

It was unclear whether MAL could be held liable for any damage caused. As the newspaper Pester Lloyd reported, the cost of the clean-up work alone was estimated at 35 million euros, but the company was only insured for a maximum of 35,000 euros in the event of damage. Initially, the residents were only granted emergency aid of 350 euros per person.

Most of the recovered fatalities were suffocated in the mud. A 35-year-old man was killed in his vehicle after his car was swept away in the wave of mud. Most of the 123 injured, including ten seriously injured, have been hospitalized for chemical burns and eye injuries.

The Torna brook flowing through the affected area flows into the Marcal river . The red mud had reached the Marcal River within a few hours. Fish mortality has been observed in the affected waters. The Marcal flows into the Raab at Karakó , which in turn flows into the Danube at Győr . Damage in the area of the western Transdanubian drinking water reservoir and a further spread of the sludge further downstream to the Danube were feared.

On October 7th, slight increases in pH were already measured at the confluence of the Raab into the Moson Danube (which only flows into the Danube after passing the Kleine Schüttinsel ), while the red color had thinned to the point that it could be seen with the naked eye was not visible. However, dead fish continued to float on the surface of the water.

A month later, the Marcal was still carrying large amounts of red mud, even at a distance of 20 km, although great efforts had been made in the meantime to clear the area of vegetation and bushes.

Red mud

It was initially unclear which substances the leaked red mud contained. In principle, red mud contains the foreign substances contained in the bauxite ore. Red mud gets its characteristic red color due to its main component iron (III) oxide . In addition, the company MAL AG indicated aluminum oxide , silicon dioxide (in the form of sodium aluminum silicate or calcium aluminum silicate ), calcium oxide , titanium dioxide and sodium oxide as components. In addition, red mud can also contain heavy metals such as arsenic , lead , cadmium , chromium , vanadium or mercury . According to analyzes commissioned by Greenpeace , one kilogram of dry matter of the leaked red mud contained 110 milligrams of arsenic, 1.3 milligrams of mercury and 660 milligrams of chromium. According to “very cautious estimates”, this results in an arsenic amount of around 50 tonnes when extrapolated to the total amount of leaked material. The water analysis of a sample taken from a superficial canal in Kolontar by a Hungarian laboratory showed an arsenic content of 0.25 milligrams / l. An element analysis by the Austrian Federal Environment Agency showed that the red mud is composed of a total of 38 chemical elements , including cadmium (7 mg / kg), nickel (270 mg / kg) and antimony (40 mg / kg).

The suspicion of contamination of the affected areas with the radioactive elements radium and thorium possibly contained in the sludge was not confirmed; the radiation based on this is negligible compared to the natural background radiation.

In a statement on the company's website, the company MAL Magyar Alumínium pointed out that the red mud is not classified as hazardous waste according to the classification according to the European waste catalog (EAK no. 010309).

However, regardless of the actual composition and the knowledge available about it in the company, there is a risk of chemical burns. Due to the process-related presence of caustic soda , the sludge has a high pH value . PH values up to 13 were measured.

enlightenment

causes

The fact that around one million cubic meters of sludge leaked out of the landfill basin, although - as the Austrian Environment Ministry announced - the protection plan for the aluminum factory was designed for only 300,000 cubic meters of red mud, reinforced the suspicion that more red mud could have been stored in the storage facility, than allowed. The operating company denied reports that the pool should have been too full. The company said that the sludge had been stored properly and in accordance with EU regulations. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said it was human error that caused the mud flood, not the floods that had hit the region before.

According to initial reports, the rupture of a bunker for toxic wastewater triggered a surge of wastewater that caused violent waves to burst the dam.

Cracks and weak points in the dam of the storage system are said to have been identified as early as June 2010 during aerial photographs. After MAL gave an assurance that the controls would be carried out regularly, no further aerial photographs were taken.

Liability issues and compensation

While MAL has offered compensation of around 400 euros per family, the American investor George Soros has also donated a million dollars to the Hungarian government through a fund for the reconstruction of the affected places. Numerous private donations in kind also arrived, for example from Burgenland , which were organized through the building materials company Leier , which operates a plant in the Devecser concerned. On October 9, 2010 the establishment of a central relief fund of the Hungarian government was announced. An official website has also been set up to better coordinate the flow of information.

In mid-November 2010, residents of Devecser wanted to block the main road leading through the town as a protest, as they were still not promised any compensation. However, this action was prohibited on the grounds of the current state of emergency.

In January 2011 the EU published an opinion drawn up in October. After this, a large part of the fault was also blamed on the Hungarian authorities, as they had not classified the red mud as hazardous waste . In addition, Hungary would not have transposed the EU directives, in particular Directive 2006/21 / EC (Mining Waste Directive) into national law. This could also result in state guarantees. However, this should only be determined in March 2011.

In autumn 2011, the aluminum company was fined € 500 million, and a court in Budapest ruled in early 2013 that the company was liable for the damage. Repairs should also be carried out on the 49 km² contaminated soil. Since the company did not pay the fine, it was nationalized. The state has set up a compensation fund, but many of those affected are still waiting for compensation.

Criminal litigation

On October 11, 2010, the CEO Zoltán Bakonyi, who is also a co-owner of MAL, was arrested. At the same time, MAL was placed under government supervision. The arrest was partly seen from a political point of view, since Bakonyi's father, like the other two co-owners, is also considered to be a “privatization winner in the orbit of the socialist party”. He was released two days later.

At the end of January 2016, Zoltán Bakonyi and 14 employees were acquitted in the first instance “for lack of a criminal offense” of allegations of neglect, violation of the Waste Management Act and environmental pollution. Nature alone is to blame for the dam breach , according to the Veszprem court in its judgment. The public prosecutor then appealed and the judgment was overturned by the court in Győr in the second instance on February 6, 2017. It was not clear on what basis the court of first instance reached its decision - any contradictions that had arisen were not investigated in the proceedings, according to the appellate judge. The repetition of the process in the first instance began in Győr in December 2017. On February 5, 2019, ten of the 15 defendants were convicted. The former bosses of MAL AG were sentenced as first and second defendants to two years and six months and two years of unconditional imprisonment, respectively. The remaining convicts received suspended sentences or fines.

aftermath

On October 15, 2010, the aluminum plant resumed production, despite numerous critical voices, also under pressure from the trade unions. The evacuation of Kolontár was also canceled on the same day and the residents were allowed to return to their homes.

By October 18, 2010, 374 of the 690 evacuated people had returned to Kolontár. In addition to further patrols by the police, cameras and motion detectors to prevent looting were installed in the village . Numerous experts from other countries or NGOs carried out their own measurements to determine the exposure to the dust after official bodies continued to speak of exposure below the limit values .

The state of emergency over the three counties was extended by the authorities until the end of 2010. At the same time, however, the production of the MAL was restarted. The newly emerging red mud should run into a new, unused but examined pool from October 28, 2010.

Even at the beginning of November 2010, the three locations were still restricted areas, so that only clearing personnel, residents and other supply personnel were allowed on site; Journalists were not allowed to enter. The Red Cross emphasized that the population will be dependent on outside help for a very long time.