FROM THE MEDIA

The Danube blues: Decades of misuse

By Elisabeth Rosenthal International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2005

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It is a primitive and aging waste management system, 30 years out of date, left over from a time when Obrenovac was a goliath of industry in Yugoslavia.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.

Studded with aging plants and factories and punctuated by huge dams, with many stretches seriously polluted or dying, the Danube River system has become a major international concern, with countries struggling to finance the required cleanup.

Few sections of the river system are clean today, the first comprehensive survey of the Danube, made public this summer, found.

"There are only about half a dozen good parts, which are becoming the exception rather than the rule," said Janos Zlinsky.

He is a senior scientist at the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe in Szentendre, Hungary. "I think now some countries are saying, 'This river's gone to the dogs anyway, so let's just use it as an industrial highway.'"

Szentendre is just outside Budapest, one of the historic capitals on the Danube's winding route and one that has been working hard to clean up its stretch of the river.

The new study, called the Roof Report, brings together data from the 13 countries along the river and its major tributaries and was coordinated by the International Committee to Protect the Danube River. It contains some alarming findings:

Seventy-one percent of water samples from the Danube and its tributaries contain DDT, a pesticide banned for decades; average levels exceeded safe limits by more than 100 times.

A number of cities still pour untreated or partly treated human waste into the river, including Belgrade, the Serbian capital, which has no sewage treatment at all. Sturgeons, once plentiful in the Black Sea and in the Danube, are nearly extinct because damming projects in Serbia blocked access to their breeding grounds.

High levels of heavy metals and chemicals are still seeping into the river from aging factories and mines, some of which are closed but have not been decontaminated. The report listed 200 places as "high risk" for environmental disasters and 1,000 more potential risk sites.

In the years after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and war in the former Yugoslavia, water quality in the Danube system actually improved in some places as inefficient or damaged factories shut their doors. But now, with countries beginning to rebuild, and foreign investors poised to reopen factories and mines, the risk of further damage is high. Plans to dredge the river for improved navigation threaten serious disruption of ecosystems.

"The question is how to repair and replace the legacy of communism, when environmental impacts were not costed properly, and also how to overcome the legacy of war," said Phillip Weller, executive director of the International Committe to Protect the Danube, in Vienna.

The new focus on the river is related to the fact that the majority of Danube countries are now members of the European Union or are scheduled for membership in the near future and so must follow the EU's water quality directive. The EU provides some funding to help new members comply.

Even countries like Serbia, which is not in the EU's immediate pipeline, have decided to join the effort when possible, although they are especially hard-pressed to finance such projects.

In terms of environmental issues, the Danube is in fact two rivers.

Upstream, in Germany and Austria, water quality tends to be very high, but the ecology of the river is highly disrupted by dams, canals and cement banks. In the middle to lower stretches of the river - from Serbia down through Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine - the slow-flowing river still often appears at its picturesque best. But many parts suffer from severe pollution: pesticide runoff from agriculture, chemicals from industry, metals from mining and human wastewater from adjacent cities.

Worse still, the hazardous effects often cross national boundaries. Five years ago, an accident at a gold mine in Romania, near the border with Hungary, dumped huge amounts of arsenic into Hungary's Tisza River, a major Danube tributary, killing all life within.

Data on heavy metal pollution, known to be a serious problem, are missing or incomplete for large stretches of the lower river, Weller said. The Roof Report found that 57 percent of water samples submitted were over safe limits for lead and copper and 47 percent were over for cadmium. Concentrations were generally low in the upper Danube.

But target values for cadmium and lead "are seriously exceeded in most of the sampling sites of the lower Danube," the report concluded, with values 2 to 10 times the acceptable limits. Levels peaked at the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, the report found. Cadmium exposure causes kidney damage and lead can impair mental development.

Pesticides show a similar profile, with increasing levels from the upper to the lower river. Extremely high levels of the pesticide Atrazine in the Sava River prompted an emergency there in 2003.

The magnitude of the Danube's pollution problem is perhaps felt nowhere more acutely than here in Serbia and Montenegro, a post-Socialist state that suffered from 10 years of war, including NATO bombs that damaged much of its industrial infrastructure.

"The river water is too dirty to use for drinking, even for washing dishes and clothes," said Mirjana Bartula, secretary general of the Danube Environmental Fund of Serbia and Montenegro. She said that, in Serbia, 80 percent of the Danube's wetlands - ecosystems that help cleanse rivers of pollutants - had disappeared in the last 15 years.

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."