An ‘Every Village,’ Awash in Misery

Often the damaging environmental effects of industry don’t feel real to faraway consumers. The carbon dioxide that spews into the air from power plants is invisible even to those who are close at hand. When the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster began last spring, few could see the impact a mile under water, conveyed only belatedly by cameras when BP decided to release the footage.

But in an otherwise obscure corner of southern Hungary, polluting caustic red mud literally flooded into people’s living rooms this week, and onto television screens in the United States and Europe. The wall of a huge sludge waste reservoir from a nearby alumina processing plant broke, sending the goo downhill into nearby villages. The story led newscasts featuring some of CNN’s and the BBC’s higher-ranking correspondents.

And yet, as dangerous waste goes, red mud, the caustic byproduct of alumina processing, is not particularly toxic; there are far worse actors. And while the advancing slime devastated hundreds if not thousands of lives in villages like Kolontar, its impact on the larger ecosystems of the Danube area is so far looking relatively limited.

As I report in Friday’s paper, the local stream, which still is clogged red with muck, emptied into progressively larger rivers that emptied into the mighty Danube. The authorities added acid upstream to counteract the red mud, a substance that is as alkaline as lye.

By the time the pollutants made it into the Danube near a city called Gyor, their presence was detectable mostly as a trace of white foam, some people said. By the time it reached Budapest hours later, its diluted presence could be measured only by a pH meter.

What made this disaster so frightening for many was not its geographical scope, but that the pollution was, well, so viscerally stunning. It flowed through people’s front doors! And the village of Kolontar seemed like an Every Village many of us could easily identify with, with daily lives driven by routines like driving to work, taking the kids to school, mowing the lawn, uncorking a bottle of wine over dinner with friends.

The photographs are vivid, yet it’s hard to adequately describe the scenes and smells there now.

Residents’ skin, clothes, homes and pets were stained red. At least four people died, and those who had prolonged contact with the muck were hospitalized with severe burns. But most were left homeless, dirty and angry, struggling to figure out how to rebuild their lives.

Yellow stucco houses with tiled roofs and carefully tended flowerboxes of geraniums now sit abandoned. Rooms are covered in thick red muck even though they have been washed by fire hoses. Peek in front doors, and you see meals that were left on carefully set tables when tragedy arrived at lunchtime on Monday.

One man who was at work when the accident happened on Monday described bitterly to me how his wife and toddler clung to a fence with the dark red muck rushing by them, waiting to be rescued. The child is fine (physically at least); the mother is recovering from burns in the hospital.

As a reporter, it is sometimes easy to leave stories behind. But it was hard leaving Kolontar on Wednesday night. The women with young children had retreated to the homes of friends and relatives. The local pub was filled with men who were were living in the part of the village that was higher up and hadn’t been flooded. Outside, emergency cleanup crews continued their work.

At the edge of the village, we gingerly removed our slime-covered boots and placed them in a plastic bag by a rubbish bin; it was not wise to take them home so contaminated. We coughed on the three-hour drive to Budapest, our lungs and throats stinging from the residue of acrid red mud. We took long hot showers to rinse it all off for good.

The villagers of Kolontar cannot. In the long term, it is unclear who will pay to relocate them or decontaminate their homes or restore their sense of well-being. George Soros is said to be sending them $1 million in emergency aid. The Hungarian government is saying that one part of the village may simply be bulldozed.

I hope the residents of Kolontar will find a way to recover from this unthinkable disaster. For the rest of us, their anguished story lends a human face to environmental problems that are too often out-of-sight, out-of-mind.