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Servisi
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[Pocetna
strana]  [Nazad]
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The
Danube blues: Decades of misuse
By Elisabeth Rosenthal International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY,
OCTOBER 6, 2005 |
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OBRENOVAC,
Serbia and Montenegro In a vast, shallow pit 100 meters from the
Sava River lie millions of tons of contaminated coal ash, the
waste product of the hulking Nikola Tesla Coal Power Plant, which
produces half of this country's electricity.
Surrounded by wildflowers and scrubby forests - and situated about
20 kilometers, or 12 miles, southwest of the point where the Sava
empties into the Danube - the ash pit is a gargantuan receptacle
of materials dangerous to human health: heavy metals, arsenic,
sulphates, iron oxide, to name a few. A series of tall, spindly
water sprinklers dot the silent, eerie field, which stretches
over 200 hectares, or 500 acres. Their aim: to keep the toxic
ash damp, making it less likely to blow out of the pit's confines.
It is a primitive and aging waste management system, 30 years
out of date, left over from a time when Obrenovac was a goliath
of industry in Yugoslavia. And when the wind is powerful, which
it is often around this time of year, the ash flies freely into
the air and the river.
"You can't do anything, the sprinklers don't do anything,"
said Dragan Colic, chief of the plant's coal supply department.
"All you can do is pray to God that the wind will stop quickly.
The technology is very limited."
Plant officials are well aware of the health risks, working day
in, day out in the heavy acrid cloud that hovers over the enormous
smokestacks.
"We are sure the ash has a very negative influence on the
population, but we are doing the best we can in the situation,"
acknowledged Nenad Rodojicic, the plant's chief manager, who spends
much of his budget attempting to upgrade aging equipment, effectively
putting Band-Aids on wounds that require major surgery.
"Of course we would like to change the technology of how
we deal with the waste - we know what we need - but the problem,
as always, is money," he said, estimating that it would take
300 million, or $360 million, to make the Tesla plant environmentally
sound.
Twenty kilometers upstream from Obrenovac, villages around the
Zasavica River, another Danube tributary, took advantage of the
postwar disruption of industry to return that river to a pristine
state. But elsewhere the situation is "getting worse overall,"
Bartula said, particularly with heavy metals and industrial pollutants.
"Every day, every year, you put this stuff in, it accumulates
in the river bed and in the plants and fish, and then the people
eat it," she said. "We all eat fish and we don't die
immediately, but heavy metal accumulates in our livers."
In Obrenovac, some people eat chestnuts from trees grown on 10-year-old
ash waste fields, trees planted to stabilize the land, although
Rodojicic, the plant manager, will not. Fishermen favor the area
near the power plant's water efflux pipe, because fish congregate
around the warm discharged water. "There are issues, but
it is not a nuclear waste site," Colic said.
Yugoslavia was "pretty well known for water management"
in the 1980s, said Jovan Despotovic, a hydraulic engineer at Belgrade
University. But now, he added, "Belgrade is without a doubt
the largest pollution site. There are 1.7 million people, lots
of industry, together with pollution from Panchevo," an industrial
center just upstream that was heavily damaged by NATO bombs, spilling
mercury into the river.
The Roof Report found that the worst sewage pollution in the Danube
occurred as it left Serbia for Romania.
"We need to develop an assessment of where and how the pollution
exists, especially the flow of heavy metals, which have not been
measured since the beginning of the '80s," Despotovic said.
In Novi Sad, upstream from Belgrade, rotting shipyards are leaching
iron and zinc. To the south in Kosovo, he added, old mines are
discharging large amounts of zinc, mercury and lead into the rivers
that flow into the Danube.
"Most are closed but they are still leaking," he said.
"Who takes responsibility? Nobody, mostly. We have the knowledge,
but lack the money to seal off the mines or to study the problem." |
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