HUNGARY IS trying to head off an ecological disaster after a wave of toxic red mud swamped several villages, killing at least four people and pouring into a tributary of the river Danube.
More than one million cubic metres of caustic sludge tore through the villages after a wall of a waste reservoir collapsed at an alumina plant at Ajka, 160km (99 miles) southwest of the capital, Budapest.
Six people are still missing and 120 others were injured after the dam burst on Monday afternoon, prompting Hungary to declare a state of emergency yesterday in the three regions worst affected by the incident.
Among the dead were two children aged three and one, officials said. One 25-year-old man was killed when his car was overturned by the wave of sludge, and an elderly man died when it inundated his home. Many of the injured needed treatment for chemical burns, and included police, firemen and soldiers who took part in the rescue effort.
Hungary’s disaster management agency said that up to 40sq km of land had been affected by the spillage, and that tonnes of gypsum and other agents were being poured into the Marcal river to bind and neutralise the poisonous waste before it reached the Danube, Europe’s second-longest river. The smaller Raba river is also in danger of contamination.
Prime minister Viktor Orban, whose government dominated local elections at the weekend, said there was no sign of radiation emanating from the sludge, and that the absence of any obvious environmental cause suggested that the dam could have collapsed due to human error.
The Hungarian company that operates the alumina works insisted that tests carried out before the accident had suggested that everything was functioning normally at the waste pool.