Greens in east Europe urge end to mining pollution
BUCHAREST (AFP) — Environmentalists from four East European countries Wednesday urged their governments to ban polluting effluents after a lake containing heavy metal waste spilt over in Romania following flash floods.
"Stop the pollution of our rivers with toxic mining waste," 45 environmental organisations said in a joint letter to the governments of Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Ukraine.
The letter also underlined the "vulnerability of the mining industry in extreme climate conditions" such as the torrential rains experienced recently in Romania and Ukraine.
It said eight years after two environmental disasters saw lakes in northern Romania overflow and contaminate several rivers with cyanide and heavy metals, the "people of this region fear a repeat.
"These people can only hope that the rain will stop before the dyke gives way. This is not acceptable."
The Romanian President Traian Basescu on Monday warned of the risk of an "environmental disaster" in the region, where one lake containing residues of heavy metals and "probably cyanide" has overflowed into a second lake posing a danger to the whole area.
Earlier this week authorities in Romania said four people died and over 11,000 people had been evacuated from their homes in the north of the country following severe flooding that also ravaged western Ukraine.
The environmentalists are calling for no more mines to be opened until problems linked to closed or abandoned mines are resolved and for the use of cyanide in extraction to be banned.
Dozens of different minerals including zinc and iron ore, copper, lead and gold are mined in Romania.
