BERLIN/WARSAW (Reuters) – German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke said on Friday that Polish and German authorities were working “categorically” to determine the cause of large numbers of fish deaths in the Oder River, warning of environmental risks. catastrophe.
Tons of dead fish have been found since late July in the Oder River that runs through Germany and Poland. Both sides said they believed a toxin was to blame but had not yet identified it.
“Environmental catastrophe is imminent,” Lemki told the NDA newspaper group. “All parties are working very hard to find the causes of this mass extinction and to minimize the additional potential damage.”
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Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said it would take years for the waterway to return to normal.
“The scale of this pollution is so big. So big that it could take years for Oder to get back to a somewhat normal state,” Morawiecki said in a regular podcast on Friday.
“It is possible that huge amounts of chemical waste were dumped into the river,” he said, adding that officials would be held accountable.
A spokesman for Germany’s environment minister said at a news conference on Friday that they are following the situation closely, and it was not yet clear what had reached the waters.
“We have an incomplete picture,” the spokesman said. “We need to clarify what substances are in the water.”
“huge” pollution
Dead fish float on the surface of the Oder River, polluting the waters and causing a mass extinction of fish in the river, in Kosterzyn upon Oder, Poland, August 11, 2022. Cezary Aszkielowicz / Agencja Wyborcza.pl via REUTERS
Green activists and opposition politicians have criticized the Polish government for not responding quickly enough to the danger and for failing to alert Poles to avoid bathing and angling in the polluted river since late July.
Germany also grumbled about Poland’s response: Brandenburg’s Environment Minister Axel Vogel said earlier that “the chains of communication between the Polish and German sides did not work out in this case.”
The head of Poland’s national water management authority said the situation was serious and that by Thursday evening, Poland had collected more than 11 tons of dead fish.
“The Public Prosecutor’s Office, the police and local environmental inspectors are investigating it,” Polish Radio 24 quoted Przemyslaw Dhaka, president of Polish Waters, as saying.
“The problem is huge, the wave of pollution extends from Wroclaw to Szczecin. Those are hundreds of kilometers from the river, and the pollution is massive.”
The German state of Brandenburg’s environment ministry said Thursday that an analysis of the river’s water conducted this week showed evidence of “synthetic chemicals, which are also very likely to have toxic effects on vertebrates,” adding that it remains unclear how the substance got into water.
According to local German radio station RBB, the government laboratory has found high levels of mercury in water samples.
But Wladyslaw Dagczak, head of the Polish province of Lubusz, was quoted by the Polish news agency, as saying that tests carried out on August 10 and 11 showed that mercury was found only “in trace amounts”, within permissible levels.
He said a levee would be erected on the Oder River near the town of Kosterzen to collect dead fish flowing in the river, with 150 soldiers from the Regional Defense Force commissioned to help clean up.
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(Reporting by Anna Ludarczak Simczuk, Marek Strzelecki and Paul Florkiewicz); Additional reporting by Thomas Eskerrit and Carol Badhull, writing by Rachel Moore; Editing by Hugh Lawson, Mike Harrison, Toby Chopra and Raisa Kasulowski
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