Poland deploys troops as dead fish pile up on river bank in toxic disaster | Hacker News Reader

Poland deploys troops as dead fish pile up on river bank in toxic disaster

washingtonpost.com

43 points2-718-281-82817 comments

German researchers detected quicksilver levels so high they exceeded the scale of the measurement equipment. People are already getting sick. Dogs are dying. This seems to be of catastrophic dimensions.

https://www.dw.com/de/wurde-die-oder-mit-quecksilber-verseuc...

This is a crime scene. Possibly an act of terrorism.

What do they mean by an "intentional" act?

What's the current forensic and motivational analysis for this?

Water sensor data should be able to point roughly to the dumping location, and winding back through the keyhole and ANPR data should bring up candidate vehicles proximate to the river-bank.

Mercury salts aren't a particularly "problematic" thing that requires covert dumping, and moving a large volume of it would seem odd. If you had a quantity of it already loaded in trucks then abandoning the trucks in a remote wood or desert would seem more expedient.

It is however an ideal aquatic poison for agricultural warfare.

I remember in the 70s when Israel was hit by mercury poisoning (deliberately injected) of Jaffa oranges - relatively easy to handle, hard to detect without x-raying all produce.

I don't buy the implied (by absence) narrative that this was some kind of "accident" or motivated by only selfish economic forces.

> I don't buy the implied (by absence) narrative that this was some kind of "accident" or motivated by only selfish economic forces.

“Huge amounts of chemical waste were probably dumped in the Oder River with full awareness of the risks and consequences,” he said in a video on Facebook. “We will not let this matter go. We will not rest until the guilty are severely punished.”

https://apnews.com/article/crime-poland-animals-fish-c96e803...

Maybe I'm just a little fussy about words.

The Washington Post article, to which the submission linked, hedges its position a little too much for my liking.

> Scientists have speculated that factors beyond deliberate dumping could be at play. The mercury could have settled in the river’s sediment due to past pollution, before being stirred up by recent dredging. Europe’s historic heat wave this summer could also be to blame. The continent is facing what is potentially its worst drought in 500 years; low water levels and high temperatures could be choking off oxygen supplies to the river’s aquatic life and worsening existing pollution.

Really? Let's see what the instruments say before speculation please "scientists".

Somehow I'm feeling that's an unnecessary or over-charitable degree of balance and restraint. Calling something a "catastrophe", instead of an "act", has softer implications that don't quite seem right here to me.

I even saw the phrase "natural disaster" being used in another article. Perhaps it's mis-translated, and they mean "man-made ecological disaster".

But there's someone out there who is responsible, who made the decision to dump huge amounts of toxic industrial waste into the water, and that is a serious crime of massive scale. (EDIT: On second thought, this could have been an accident.)

It permanently poisoned the river for its surrounding ecosystem and communities.

I am German and had to look on Wikipedia what the consensus of the term "Naturkatastrophe" (literally "natural catastrophe") is.

Wikipedia suggests a Naturkatastrophe is any disaster where the destructive force is nature, regardless of the cause.

There is the more specific "Umweltkatastrophe" ("ecological catastrophe") that apparently requires direct human cause.

I can imagine this being a mistranslation, but personally also find these terms incredibly nitpicky.

Thank you for clarification.

Humanity is part of nature, so I suppose technically all man-made ecological disasters are "natural". But it feels like evading responsiblity, when we've knowingly caused the disaster over years and decades.

I know only a little bit of German language, but I did see this headline:

  Bundesumweltministerin Lemke warnt: „Hier bahnt sich eine Umweltkatastrophe an“

That seems to give a more accurate description, that we're responsible for what's happening.

> Environmental groups have criticized Poland’s government for its slow response to the contamination, which local fishermen noticed in late July. The German environment ministry said Warsaw did not officially inform Berlin of the disaster until Thursday, weeks after the dead fish first appeared.

The apathy from Poland govt officials on this matter is baffling.

People are quite sure the government is involved in some way, either by this being done by a government-owned companies that were stuffed with their own as soon as the current party got in power, or some of them allowed it to happen and they will be protected at all cost.

They provide a perfect level of incompetence, and bigotry. If they win the next election the country is done for.

No, they cover up their patrons. The Germans.

Another successful special environmental terrorism operation

Time to analyze the corpse of the ill beluga found in the Seine last week, it seems.

http://archive.today/0lVVo

Shouldn’t it be fairly easy to identify the location of the crime? Just measure mercury levels repeatedly going upstream. Perhaps even using a “quicksort” like pattern.

Not easy. It was found several hours upstream, near Oława, but hinting that it may already have come from Annaberg. That's a huge distance to cover, up to the Czech border.

Which Annaberg do you mean? And: How could it go upstream, from the source of contamination? I’d expect levels to go, downstream to upstream, like this (each digit one sample, 9 being the highest): 4567893210. Source of contamination being between 9 and 3.

I am not sure if this is what the earlier poster meant, but if it was a transient release rather than an ongoing discharge, the entire distribution curve you are referring to would be moving downstream. You have to work a flow model backwards to try to interpret where the pulse originated. It is a bit like trying to trace floating debris in the ocean backwards using models of currents and surface wave action. Because the velocity of flow varies throughout the cross section of the stream, this gradient will also get smeared out into a less distinct pulse as it flows downstream. If the contamination is not totally soluble, then this would get even more complicated as sedimentation would more likely occur in slower moving areas.

Good point. I was under the impression that this stuff accumulates in the sand etc.. And that it does not disappear over just, say, two months. Sediments upstream of the influx would still be clean.

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