“Huge amounts of chemical waste were probably dumped in the Oder River with full awareness of the risks and consequences,” he said in a video on Facebook. “We will not let this matter go. We will not rest until the guilty are severely punished.”
https://apnews.com/article/crime-poland-animals-fish-c96e803...
The Washington Post article, to which the submission linked, hedges its position a little too much for my liking.
> Scientists have speculated that factors beyond deliberate dumping could be at play. The mercury could have settled in the river’s sediment due to past pollution, before being stirred up by recent dredging. Europe’s historic heat wave this summer could also be to blame. The continent is facing what is potentially its worst drought in 500 years; low water levels and high temperatures could be choking off oxygen supplies to the river’s aquatic life and worsening existing pollution.
Really? Let's see what the instruments say before speculation please "scientists".
Somehow I'm feeling that's an unnecessary or over-charitable degree of balance and restraint. Calling something a "catastrophe", instead of an "act", has softer implications that don't quite seem right here to me.
But there's someone out there who is responsible, who made the decision to dump huge amounts of toxic industrial waste into the water, and that is a serious crime of massive scale. (EDIT: On second thought, this could have been an accident.)
It permanently poisoned the river for its surrounding ecosystem and communities.
Wikipedia suggests a Naturkatastrophe is any disaster where the destructive force is nature, regardless of the cause.
There is the more specific "Umweltkatastrophe" ("ecological catastrophe") that apparently requires direct human cause.
I can imagine this being a mistranslation, but personally also find these terms incredibly nitpicky.
Humanity is part of nature, so I suppose technically all man-made ecological disasters are "natural". But it feels like evading responsiblity, when we've knowingly caused the disaster over years and decades.
I know only a little bit of German language, but I did see this headline:
Bundesumweltministerin Lemke warnt: „Hier bahnt sich eine Umweltkatastrophe an“