Pike, gobyons, catfish: tons of them float lifeless on the surface of the Oder River, carried away by the current, on the border between Germany and Poland. “We have never seen something like this happen” says a fisherman from Brieskow-Finkenheerd in Brandenburg, describing the most serious fish deaths in living memory, for days under the eyes of Poles and Germans. The exact extent of the “environmental catastrophe” – as the Polish authorities define it – has not yet been estimated, but in the meantime tensions are growing between the two countries due to Poland’s failure to communicate “the crime”, as the German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke.
The Polish state authorities claim that they have already collected at least 10 tons of dead fish, while in Germany the count in the Land of Brandenburg for the moment is “several tons” and bathing bans have started, as well as the ban on letting water animals with river water. But the key questions about where it happened, when and what substances were illegally spilled into the river still remain to be clarified. The Oder River, Odra in Polish, originates in the Czech Republic, crosses Poland and then delimits the Polish-German border, before flowing into the Baltic. And if the alarm went off in Germany three days ago, in Poland the first sightings of dead fish are two weeks earlier, between 26 and 28 July, near the city of Olawa in Silesia, where there is an important industrial district. . The exact place, however, has not been identified, it is a matter of hypothesis.
Unlike in Germany, the alarms in Poland went unheeded for a long time. The mayors of the Wroclaw region complained that they were not warned and that they let their children calmly bathe in the poisoned river. And so on Friday Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki ran for cover, with a visit to the banks of the river and a request for the resignation of the director of the water surveillance authority of Daca and the head of the authority for the environment.
“The reaction of the competent authorities should have been faster,” said the Polish premier. Meanwhile, it is still yellow on the identification of the substances that would have caused the pollution of the river. In recent days there was talk of mercury and heavy metals. But on Saturday evening the Polish environment minister, Anna Moskwa, tweeted that the veterinary institute in Warsaw “excludes the presence of heavy metals as a cause of fish deaths.”
While there is a “very significant increase in saline load” in the waters of the river, according to the German Minister of the Environment of Brandenburg Axel Vogel. It could also be substances that have long been present in the Oder, argues the Minister of the Environment of the German Land “which with a normal water level are not problems”, but with the decrease in the water level due to heavy drought they increase by concentration in an intolerable way. This too is only a hypothesis and laboratory tests are still ongoing in Germany. The whole matter seems so difficult to explain that the Polish authorities have even offered a reward equivalent to about 210 thousand euros for those who are able to offer a convincing solution to the mystery. Meanwhile, the German Minister Steffi Lemke today expressed impatience for the lack of cooperation with the Polish authorities. The information arrived late in Poland “and even later to us”, she said in an interview with the broadcaster Ed.
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