Very often it’s difficult to realise how vulnerable water-life is and how much responsibility we, humans, have. The Slovak and the Hungarian media have now reported another sad example: a river that turned orange.
With its source in the Stolica Mountain, Slaná (in Slovak) or Sajó (in Hungarian) is a 229 km long river that flows through Slovakia and Hungary to reach river Tisza.
Water from a closed-down mine has polluted Slaná since February. As authorities were pointing at one another, the sheer volume of poisonous water has been increasing(!) ever since. A member of a local fishing association, Tibor Varga will take the matter to the European Commission, after taking part in the examination of the wildlife of the river.
Samples were gathered at three different locations, and on a 10-km stretch no living fish or crayfish were found, the corpses of the latter, however, almost covered the riverbank.
Trout, graylings and chubs are among the species that have disappeared from the river. In February, the concentration of zinc was 100 times higher than the dose already lethal for trout, hence the devastating effect and the scale of the threat was not only predictable: it was foreseeable.
