Tons of dead fish have been found since late July in the Oder River, which runs through Germany and Poland. Both sides have said they believe a toxic substance is to blame, but have yet to identify it. “An environmental catastrophe is on the horizon,” Lemke told the RND newspaper group. “All sides are working steadily to find the reasons for this massive impairment and to minimize possible further damage.” Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said the waterway would take years to return to normal. “The scale of this pollution is very large. So large that the Oder may take years to return to a fairly normal state,” Morawiecki said on a regular podcast on Friday. “It is possible that huge amounts of chemical waste have been dumped into the river,” he said, adding that those responsible would be held accountable. A spokesman for Germany’s environment ministry told a news conference on Friday that they were closely monitoring the situation and that it was not yet clear what had entered the water. “We have an incomplete picture,” the spokesman said. “We need clarity about the materials that are in the water.”
“GIANT” POLLUTION
Dead fish float on the surface of the Oder River, as the water is polluted causing a mass extinction of fish in the river, in Kostrzyn upon Oder, Poland, August 11, 2022. Cezary Aszkielowicz/Agencja Wyborcza.pl via REUTERS read more Green activists and opposition politicians have criticized the Polish government for not responding quickly enough to the danger and not warning Poles to avoid swimming and fishing in the polluted river since late July. Germany also has grumbles about Poland’s response: Brandenburg’s Environment Minister Axel Vogel had earlier said that “the communication chains between the Polish and German sides did not work in this case”. The head of Poland’s national water management authority said the situation was serious and that by Thursday evening Poland had collected more than 11 tonnes of dead fish. “(An investigation is underway) by the prosecutor’s office, the police and local environmental protection inspectorates,” Polish Waters head Przemyslaw Dacha said, according to Polish Radio 24. “The problem is huge, the wave of pollution stretches from Wrocław to Szczecin. These are hundreds of kilometers of river, the pollution is huge.” An analysis of river water taken this week showed evidence of “synthetic chemicals, probably with toxic effects on vertebrates,” Germany’s environment ministry in Brandenburg said on Thursday, adding that it remained unclear how the substance entered the water. According to local German broadcaster rbb, the state laboratory found high levels of mercury in the water samples. However, Wladyslaw Dajczak, head of Poland’s Lubusz province, was quoted by the PAP news agency as saying that tests carried out on August 10 and 11 showed only “traces” of mercury, well within permitted levels. He said a dam would be erected on the Oder near the town of Kostrzyn to collect dead fish flowing down the river, with 150 Territorial Defense Forces soldiers assigned to help with the cleanup. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk, Marek Strzelecki and Pawel Florkiewicz. Additional reporting by Thomas Escritt and Karol Badohal, Writing by Rachel More; Editing by Hugh Lawson, Mike Harrison, Toby Chopra and Raissa Kasolowsky Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
