24 Feb 2000 - ROMANIA: Czech experts leave to monitor cyanide in Tisza, Danube.
PRAGUE, Feb 24 (CTK) - A team of Czech experts, who will monitor the damage caused by the leak of cyanide from the gold mine Baia Mare in Romania to Tisza and Danube rivers within a U.N. mission, left for Romania this morning.
Czech Environment Minister Milos Kuzvart stressed the prompt reaction of the Czech Republic to the call to participate in the mission which operates in Romania, Hungary and Croatia. The Czech Republic offered its help to monitor the damage in all affected countries.
The help is to cost some 1.5 million crowns and will last three weeks, Kuzvart said.
"We will especially evaluate the impact of the catastrophe and propose measures to prevent similar events in the future," the deputy chairman of the Water Monitoring Institute Jan Boucek said. According to him, the Czech experts will also take samples of deposits from the bottom of the rivers and later analyse them.
The cyanide spill, which reportedly occurred on January 30 at Romania's Baia Mare gold mine, half-owned by the Australian company Esmeralda, killed all life in at least 600 kilometres of rivers affected. Drinking water for some 2.5 million people is at risk. The experts predict that life will return to the rivers in some 5 years.
The OSN mission will have 16 members - three from Switzerland, three from Finland, four from the Czech Republic and two from each Sweden, Germany and Austria.
Kuzvart said that mining companies in the Czech Republic also wanted to process ore by means of cyanide. The Environment Ministry, however, rejected their request. "The leak of cyanide in Baia Mare proves that the Czech government strategy not to allow prospecting and gold mining is grounded," Kuzvart said.
(1$=35.532 crowns)
ice/dr/ms.
(c) 2000, CTK Business News. Published by Czech News Agency (CTK).
Sources: CTK-BUSINESS NEWS 24/02/2000
REUTERS Business Briefing , 25-2-2000
24 Feb 2000 - BULGARIA: DANUBE FISH TESTED FOR HEAVY METALS.
THE REGIONAL commission for management of natural disasters and industrial accidents in Rousse ordered a check of the pollution of the fauna in Danube with heavy metals. Officially the analyses are made because of the environmental pollution from the Romanian-Austrian gold mine. According to insiders, however, these analyses will have to show what the pollution of the river is from the Serbian mine near the town of Bor, which was destroyed by NATO bombings.
Vidin's regional governor Dr Vladimir Dimitrov issued an order yesterday revoking the ban on the use of the Danube water, the catching, sale and eating of fish from the river. The concentration of cyanide in the Danube at the town of Silistra was 0.017 mg per litre about noon yesterday. The admissible limit for cyanide concentration is 0.1 mg per litre. /PARI/.
(c) 2000, Pari Daily. Published by RUBICON PUBLISHING & TRADING COMPLEX.
Sources: PARI DAILY (BULGARIA) 24/02/2000
REUTERS Business Briefing , 25-2-2000
24 Feb 2000 - ROMANIA: POLLUTION -
RIVERS DANUBE AND TISZA,
EASTERN EUROPE.
London, Feb 23 - A press report from Bucharest, dated Feb 22, states: Romanian prosecutors today began questioning workers at a gold mine about the circumstances of a devastating cyanide spill last month. "No criminal investigation is going on yet," said Dan Bocurtean, chief prosecutor of the Maramures region, the Mediafax news agency reported. It was still unclear if he would take legal action against the joint Australian-Romanian company running the gold mine. Yesterday cyanide levels in seven wells near the mine were from 4.5 to 700 times higher than the Romanian standards of 0.01 mg per litre, said Andrei Muresan, head of the health authority in Baia Mare, 265 miles north-west of Bucharest. Following a recent thaw in the Baia Mare area, more cyanide has apparently seeped into the wells of the nearby village of Bozanta Mare, Romanian officials said. Meanwhile, local authorities in counties along the Danube River shut down water pumps supplying water from the Danube as the cyanide wave approached them. Bocurtean was quoted by Mediafax as saying the workers supervising the reservoir's dam had apparently made no mistake. (See issue of Feb 23.).
(c) Lloyd's Information Casualty Report.
Sources: LLOYD'S LIST , LLOYD'S INFORMATION CASUALTY REPORT 24/02/2000
REUTERS Business Briefing , 25-2-2000