Hungary's prime minister on Monday blamed "human negligence" for a spill of toxic red sludge that killed at least seven people last week, and said the government should take control of the company responsible. Government spokeswoman Anna Nagy said Zoltan Bakonyi, the head of Hungarian aluminium producer MAL Zrt, had been detained for 72 hours.
Disaster crews were racing on Monday to finish an emergency dam to hold back a threatened second spill of the toxic mud, a by-product of alumina production, from the sludge reservoir owned by MAL. Prime Minister Viktor Orban told parliament damages must be paid to those affected by the spill, jobs at the plant must be saved, those responsible must be held accountable and further risks at the company's sites should be identified. "Hungary's largest ecological disaster was caused by human negligence, by allowing a hazardous material to escape from a plant built and operated by people," Orban said.
"We need to bring the company responsible for the red sludge spill under state control, and its assets under state closure, until all of these four tasks are handled," he told parliament. Orban said a state commissioner would be appointed to take over control over MAL and manage its assets.
"In light of what happened, we have good reason to believe that there were people who were aware of the dangerously weakened state of the walls of the reservoirs, but driven by their private interests they believed they were not worth repairing and hoped that the trouble could be avoided."
A million cubic metres of red mud burst out of the reservoir last Monday, fouling rivers including a tributary of the Danube. Disaster crews were racing to finish an emergency dam to protect the village of Kolontar in case the weakened wall of the damaged reservoir falls. "We hope to have the dam finished by Tuesday," the prime minister's spokesman told TV2 on Monday. With the nearby town of Devecser, home to 5,400 people, still on alert and Kolontar evacuated, the exact cause of the disaster remained unclear.
In a statement on its website on Sunday, MAL said the walls of the reservoir met the prescribed rigidity standards, based on the findings of a technical survey carried out in 1995. Gusztav Winkler, a professor at Budapest Technical University, who surveyed the site when the reservoir was being built 30 years ago, told Reuters the structure of the soil made the reservoir unstable.
Tibor Dobson, a spokesman for disaster crews, said evacuated residents of the village of Kolontar must remain in emergency accommodation. One person is still missing. Kolontar was evacuated on Saturday after cracks appeared in the northern wall of the reservoir. Dobson told Reuters on Monday the latest checks performed on the damaged northern wall of the sludge reservoir showed no further disturbance.
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