Frustration was growing Friday among the inhabitants of Kolontar, the village at the centre of a chemical waste spill that has become Hungary's worst ever ecological catastrophe. Hundreds of emergency service workers, many wearing protective white suits, are involved in cleanup operations, while teams of volunteers distribute essential supplies and platoons of soldiers march along the road leading into the remote village.
Despite the efforts to clean the streets, the scene in Kolontar, the village closest to the alumina plant that unleased a million cubic metres of caustic red mud on Monday, remains one of devastation. An unpleasant metallic tang has been hanging in the air all week.
Now warm late autumn sunshine is drying out the red mud and clouds of brick-red dust are being blown around the village and the surrounding countryside. Once fertile fields of wheat and maize now offer a Martian vista of acres and acres of red. Meanwhile, the locals walk around the streets of their village in rubber boots, some wearing paper masks, many still finding it difficult to take in what has happened to their normally peaceful, out of the way village. They are also worried for the future. "What happened here on Monday was a catastrophe," said one pensioner.
"But what awaits us is just as bad, when this mud dries and more dust starts blowing around. How are they going to clean it up?" she demands to know. Some want to know who is responsible for destroying their village. "This happened because someone was negligent, everyone here feels that," says Csabane Krebsz, another Kolontar resident.
The firm that owned the plant in Ajka, 160 kilometres from the capital Budapest, has come under fire from residents and politicians. The mayor of Ajka, the nearby town where the alumina plant is located, has slammed MAL Magyar Aluminium for the "unfortunate" comments made by the firm's directors the day after the accident.
MAL directors Zoltan Bakonyi and Lajos Tolnay told residents there was no reason to fear, and likened to red mud to "paint" that could be "washed off". "Then why are there over 100 people in hospital, many of them with lasting damage to their skin or eyes?" Ajka's mayor Bela Schwartz was quoted as saying by the state news agency MTI.
Residents of Kolontar and nearby Devecser were also less than impressed with MAL's offer of 30 million forints (150,000 dollars) to provide immediate relief for the families whose homes were wrecked in the poisonous flood. Schwartz dismissed the offer with scorn as one that "cannot be taken seriously".
For another Kolontar resident, Janos, seeing heads roll is less important that restoring life to some kind of normality. "I don't care about the company, I don't know if this was someone's fault," he says. His complaint was that the residents had not been given a clear idea of what the government is doing on their behalf. "Even Viktor Orban said this is a dead village. What next?" he asks, referring to a visit by the prime minister the day before.
Orban visited the worst affected part of the village, where red stains run two metres up the walls of the bungalows, with their windows smashed and furniture scattered across the adjacent field. He said there was no question of repairing the neighbourhood, the people would have to be rehoused elsewhere. But he did not say when or where.
"All we get is announcements that there will be an announcement soon," said one young man. "And now there's this red dust," Janos says gesturing bitterly. "We don't even know how poisonous it is, what it's doing to us," he says. Meanwhile, offers of help were rolling in, the latest a million dollars pledged by the billionaire Hungarian-American financier George Soros's Open Society Institute.
National television stations are broadcasting appeals for cash from the general public. For the residents of Kolontar, many of whom say they no longer feel safe living in the shadow of the Ajka alumina factory, that help cannot reach them soon enough.