Slovak Officials Ignore Hazardous Pollution

By Zhanna Bilenko

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia, June 25, 2002 (ENS) - Under a new waste law adopted last year by the Slovak Parliament, producers of waste are responsible for its final disposal. But today illegal dumps are still situated just anywhere, and they are polluting the soil in the Slovak capital Bratislava. In addition, Bratislava is facing the environmental consequences of longstanding contamination with petroleum products.

"Before 1992 there was no law concerning rubbish dumps," said Danka Thalmeinerova, head of the environmental policy program AINOVA and a consultant to the Slovak Ministry of Environment.

Bratislava (Photo credit unknown)

"I don't remember a case in which this has happened," she said.

Until 2001, there were 129 legal landills in Slovakia, but only 40 of them met the technical requirements.

Municipalities are responsible for remediation of local illegal dumps. "So, usually municipal officers will hire the truck once a year to clear a place," Thalmeinerova said.

Tremendous efforts and financial support are necessary to solve this problem. Because soil contamination influences underground water, which can travel for long distances, it can contaminate water in wells, reservoirs and tanks far from the original source of pollution.

Contaminated water is especially dangerous when it combines with fertilizers which Slovak farmers have overused for many years.

"Saved fertilizers damaged soil and ground water sources," Thalmeinerova says. "Now the Slovak government is preparing a guideline for farmers about good agricultural practice so that farmers will not overuse fertilizers again."

Ruzinov district of Bratislava (Photo credit unknown)

The survey found that the land contains slowly leaking pollutants such as methane, pentane, hexane, heptane and octane that officials fear could collect in explosive quantities.

But this contamination was not on record at the Geofond Institute, a state agency which is supposed to register all the results of test drillings.

The original contamination was caused 56 years ago when the U.S. Air Force bombed the former Apollo oil refinery on the banks of the Danube River at the end of World War II. The situation became the worse at that time because of leaks from the former Chemikachemical factory.

Many people live and shop in the same areas where researchers have found dangerous pollution, but the majority of them know nothing of the dangers.

Some physicians, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that oil contamination can cause genetic changes in human organisms. It takes a long time, they said, but mutations will create "terrible consequences" for coming generations.

"Level of gases in the earth and their leaking into the atmosphere are major problems, because these gases are explosive," Martin Murin, the head of the Bratislava based Ecotoxology Centre, told the daily newspaper "Hospodarske Noviny."

But not one state environmental laboratory is researching the extent to which the pollution in Bratislava has influenced public health.

Thalmeinerova said, "We have no any organization occupied with the investigation of sickness rates and the influence environmental pollution."

EU and Slovak officials discuss the path to full membership in the European Union for the Republic of Slovakia. May 18, 2001. (Photo courtesy EU Committee of the Regions)

The European Commission will assess each country’s progress towards meeting all accession criteria in its 2002 Regular Reports. On the basis of these recommendations, the next European Council in Brussels will decide which countries will be ready to conclude negotiations by the end of 2002.

Progress towards full membership in the European Union depends upon "good preparation on the ground by each candidate country that guarantees the fulfilment of all conditions for accession," the Spanish Presidency said.

The Accession Treaty is expected to be signed in March 2003, making possible its entry into force by January 2004. The goal is that in 2004 all 10 candidate countries would participate as full members in European Parliament elections.