KOLONTAR, Hungary — The disaster that buried three Hungarian villages in caustic red sludge last week is deepening the gloom of a country gripped by recession, polarization and the near-ubiquitous feeling that its people are doomed to be victims of calamity.
Gyoergy Hoffmann, a coal miner in Ajka, a city near the spill, called it “just the latest stroke of fate” for a country dominated for centuries by foreign powers — first the Turks, then the Austrians and finally the Soviets, who turned the country into the communist bloc’s main producer of alumina.
For decades, Hungary made the aluminum ingredient and shipped it to Russia, which sold the metal back to Hungary and other Soviet bloc nations at world market prices.
Swept by euphoria after the collapse of communism, Hungary considered itself ahead of its neighbors in cleaning up the environmental sins of the Soviet era. Rusting, polluted factories and abandoned garbage dumps, once common along Hungary’s back roads, have become a rare sight.
But alumina plants remained active, including the factory outside the village of Kolontar, where the rupture of a wall holding waste sludge dumped up to 184 million gallons of highly polluted water and mud onto three villages in about an hour Monday. At least seven people died in the caustic muck.
“There have been too many national cataclysms for Hungarians to be able to overcome their pessimism,” said sociology professor Antal Bohm. “This catastrophe is simply one more in the series.”
Some of the gloom is understandable. Hungary’s economy contracted by almost 7 percent last year. The country has been forced to draw on about two-thirds of a lifeline of nearly $28 billion thrown by the EU, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank two years ago.
Nearly 2 million people are groaning under growing debt as the strong Swiss franc makes their loans in that currency insupportable.
With the hard times comes the need to find scapegoats, allowing the far-right Jobbik party to emerge third-strongest in April elections after a campaign tinged with anti-Semitic and anti-Gypsy rhetoric and marches by militia.
Second inundation a threat
DEVECSER, Hungary — The cracking wall of an industrial plant reservoir appeared on the verge of collapse late Saturday, and engineers were working to blunt a possible second wave of the caustic red sludge that has already deluged several towns in western Hungary and killed seven.
Residents of one nearby town were evacuated, others were ordered to be ready to evacuate, and everyone was bracing for a new onslaught of toxic material.
Engineers were building retaining walls around the previous breach in MAL Rt.’s storage pool and the weakened wall of the reservoir just outside Kolontar, the town hardest hit by the sludge flood. Kolontar’s nearly 800 residents were evacuated as a preventive measure.
The prime minister said experts had estimated that about 500,000 cubic meters of red sludge could escape from the reservoir if the wall collapsed, but they said exact figures were hard to calculate. The Associated Press
