Abandoned Chemical Plants Threaten the Danube. By Doug Saunders, TorontoG&M, 10/16/10. “The Ajkai alumina refinery disaster exposed an alarming half-buried legacy of poison and potential disaster that stretches along the banks of the Danube River as it courses through the former Communist nations of Eastern Europe -- a decades-old legacy of crumbling chemical plants and mines… During the decades of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviets had designated the Danube basin -- notably Hungary, but also Romania, Bulgaria and their neighbors -- the empire’s centre of chemical and mineral processing. After the end of communism in 1989, the plants either passed into private hands, often with little investment or upkeep, or were abandoned…
“When the countries of the eastern Danube joined the European Union -- Hungary in 2004, then Romania and Bulgaria in 2007 -- they became subject to some of the world’s most rigorous environmental regulations. To qualify for membership, both the prospective members and Brussels invested billions in upgrading health and safety infrastructure. But officials now fear that many of these countries, which tend to register high on corruption indices, may have hidden unsafe, crumbling industries in much the same way that Greece hid billions in debt liabilities. There is a fear, one European Commission official involved in the Hungarian case said, that ‘these guys could be paying the inspectors to overlook a chemical Chernobyl.’”
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