inquinamento da sostanze tossiche in Serbia

[agimona@libero.it]

'No one will be able to prove what killed us'

Chemicals released after Nato bombing infect Serbian city

Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Tuesday May 15, 2001
The Guardian

When the Nato bombs started to fall on Pancevo's petro-chemical 
factory 10 miles east of Belgrade next to the Danube in Serbia, the 
locals thought it must be a mistake. Surely even in war no one would 
risk releasing deadly chemicals less than two miles from a city.

But as the attacks continued, it was clear that they were being aimed 
at storage tanks that contained the raw materials for PVC.

As the air strikes continued, heroic efforts were made to load them 
into rail tankers to save the civilian population. But it was all in 
vain - 80,000 people were exposed to a dose of one chemical 10,500 
times above the safe limit.

At the height of the Nato offensive, the bombing of Pancevo was seen 
as a victory against a strategic target because of its spectacularly 
burning oil refinery, with only a footnote of regret about the 
contamination of the canal that feeds into the Danube.

But two years on, the long-term damages caused to the city, its 
people and their water supply are only now being fully realised and 
dealt with. The UN Environment Programme (Unep) and the city are 
desperately trying to scrape together the funds to save the area from 
continuing environmental disaster.

Already, 100 workers who tried to stop the leaks and limit the damage 
of chemicals flowing into the ground have been declared permanent 
invalids because of lung damage. A number of young men have had 
unexplained heart trouble.

Two years after the bombing, despite two winters of heavy rains to 
cleanse the soil, still nothing grows around the petrochemical works. 
The earth has patches of dark- green algae in puddles but no other 
life; elsewhere, the countryside is alive with verdant growth.

The newly elected mayor of Pancevo, Borislava Kruska, a quietly 
spoken woman, says by the time Nato experts had arrived months after 
the bombing, the chemicals on the surface, which were causing air 
pollution, had evaporated. Most of the chemicals, however, remain 
just below the surface.

"It is what I call the perfect murder. Nobody will be able to prove 
what killed us," she said. Unep says a saturation level of one part 
per million of vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) in the air is enough to 
trigger cancer of the liver. It can cause brain tumours and attacks 
the nervous system.

In Pancevo, the saturation reached 10,500 parts per million.

It is too early to see the effects on the human population, but there 
are alarming signs that something is wrong: A rare bone cancer, 
previously restricted to very old dogs, has being found in abundance 
in puppies and adolescents.

And VCM is not the mayor's only worry. Another PVC chemical, 1,2- 
dichloroethane (EDC), is highly toxic and particularly attacks the 
liver and kidneys. At least 2,000 tonnes of it leaked into the ground 
after the bombing.

Eating any root vegetables in Pancevo has been banned and tests show 
that EDC has penetrated deep into the ground, close to the city's 
water supply.

A group of experts from several countries is trying to work out how 
to recover the EDC before it reaches the water table. An estimated 
130,000 people use the local water pumped from the ground.

Unep estimates that the pollution problem will cost £14m to fix; so 
far it has raised £4.5m from the international community that bombed 
Pancevo. Holes will need to be drilled to pump out the contaminated 
water before it reaches the water table.

The canal, which runs from the bombed water-treatment plant at the 
factory to the Danube, needs £4m worth of dredging to prevent the 
contaminants leaking into Europe's longest river.

Some urgent remedial measures have been taken. In one area, Unep has 
removed 80cm (31.5in) of topsoil to collect most of the 8 tonnes of 
mercury released by bombing.

The technical manager of the factory, Dmitar Krivokuca, who is 
working with UNEP on the clean up, said: "There has been some 
poisoning of our workers and people are in jeopardy the whole time, 
but we have to clear this up if we are going to restart and
provide employment."

The neighbouring oil refinery has started work again providing the 
first jobs in an area that had 10,000 industrial workers before the 
war.

The smell of sulphur now dominates from the cheap Russian oil being 
processed, but filters will be fitted when funds permit.

The mayor said: "We are not pretending that before the bombing the 
area was not polluted, it was, but not on this scale.

"As we go on living and dying in Pancevo, we will never be able to 
prove what is killing us. No population has been exposed to this 
level of these chemicals anywhere in the world. What we need is help 
to stop it getting worse."