2022 Oder Environmental Disaster | Hacker News Reader

2022 Oder Environmental Disaster

en.wikipedia.org

215 pointsRed_Tarsius43 comments

My girlfriend's cousin lives on this river, in Wrocław. It's causing quite a political scandal, with the PiS leadership accusing the opposition of causing it (of course, this is blatantly untrue) https://wiadomosci.onet.pl/lubuskie/spozniona-reakcja-w-spra...

I am living in apartment block next to this river in Wrocław.

Oder was always considered dirty river here. On hot days it smells like something rotten, its absolutely defeating to cross it by bridge and I thank god my apartment’s windows are on the other side.

But people still fish in it in center of city. I can only hope they do it for sport and not for food.

Well, it is a rather small river and the first major conglomeration is Ostrava with a population of 900,000 and a shitton of heavy industry to this day. On the other hand still having some non-offshore industry (DE, CZ, PL, etc) has many advantages too. Especially in the coming years.

Having industry doesn't necessarily mean destroying the environment. Regulations regarding emissions exist for a reason. But as long as industrialists are allowed to externalize the costs for "doing business" in a scheme to socialize the negative effects and privatize earnings we are in a bad position.

Clean up the mess you produce should be a basic and decent course of action. Not only for us humans but for every human endeavor.

I am also living in an apartment block in Wrocław next to this river. I was also born here and what you describe is a gross misrepresentation. While it is not considered clean enough for swimming, you cannot actually smell it going over any bridge. Crowds of people spend evenings and weekends in outdoor pubs right on the banks of Oder and seem unfazed. None of my friends or family has ever mentioned being overwhelmed or even feeling any sort of odor. I wonder how is it possible to have so different impressions of the same place? I also wonder what makes you want to discredit the place where you live so much and create false image of it in other people's heads?

I invite you to cross it by either Sikorski bridge or Dmowski bridge when its 30 degree celcius on summer day. It absolutely reeks. The stench goes down with temperature, so I guess its okay when you are drinking at Słodowa or past Grunwald bridge at later hour?

Here is news story about this from 2015 where people complaining about river smelling terrible over other bridges: https://wroclaw.wyborcza.pl/wroclaw/7,35771,18834396,czemu-w...

It’s part of their playbook to do that with any controversy that pops up.

A cool HN feature would be to snooze an article for, say, 2 weeks, so that we could come back to it when we know some more facts. At the moment, it’s an interesting event, but discussion is plagued with speculation as to the cause.

It's not specific to HN. And I guess a regular agenda might do. I'd guess that's how journalists make sure to follow up with things in the "this day 3 years ago x happened" articles?

But I agree I'd like a dedicated place for such reminders.

I don't mind having multiple/recurring threads on some topics. They serve different purposes: my main goal was to raise awareness on an event that seemed neglected by my country's newspapers. Then, if people catch up on the issue, it will be easier to engage in follow-up discussions when we get more data. I also enjoy to read the speculations and flow of thoughts of posters from different backgrounds.

Its probably biggest environmental catastrophy in Europe after chernobyl, and the best of all polish goverment officials said on wednesday: "Everything is fine, you can go swim in the river and catch fish" and 2 days later they revert it all and send warnings to all people living near the river and this proceder was going on for at least 2 weeks.

That's a classic! That was already the government propaganda (at least here in France) at the time of Chernobyl, that everything is fine and kids should play outside like any other day.

The same kind of situation happened 3 years ago in Rouen (France) where a Lubrizol chemical factory burnt down and the government said everything was just fine, before taking emergency measures, before finally saying that everything was fine all along. It was not the first incident with that plant, and the richer people did not wait for the release of the list of chemicals involved in the incident to leave the city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubrizol_factory_fire_in_Rouen

It’s a literal toxic mafia it seems. Just dump without consequences and pay the politicians to close their eyes. I hope countries wake up soon.

There were a few environmental disasters since Chernobyl, for example the Sandoz fire which poisoned the rhine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandoz_chemical_spill

Or the Prestige oil spill. The cleaning bill to remove the 70.000 tonnes of fuel would fall in he range of 2.5 billion to 10 billion euro. One can really destroy a local economy with that.

Back in 2000 there was also a Romanian gold mine polluting rivers in Romania, Hungary, Serbia and the Danube all the way to the Black Sea. Allegedly 100 tonnes of cyanides were spilled into the river ecosystem. The related wikipedia article [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Baia_Mare_cyanide_spill

AFAIK they still don’t know what caused this, which makes it the perfect social media rage machine, because everyone is free to blame anyone.

The Wikipedia article says testing found mesitylene to be the likely cause. So just another case of "improving capitalist efficiency" by turning economic costs into economic externalizes

If we actually made corporations pay to clean up their bs, I wonder how many years of "economic growth" would turn out to have been an illusion. The other day an article was posted here showing that, in Australia, backyard eggs have 5x the lead content of store-bought eggs due to pollution. Today 10% of all yearly deaths worldwide are caused by air pollution. Another article on the frontpage of HN today is about how rainwater even as far as in Antartica is not safe to drink due to PFAS. Even if you recycle, chances are the majority of your plastics end up in a landfill or the ocean

Imagine if we actually made these companies take into account the full lifecycle costs of their products. Styrofoam takes around a million years to naturally decompose. A styrofoam cup would probably cost thousands of dollars. Other plastics don't last as long, but you can imagine the "economic disaster" that would be caused by plastics suddenly costing in dollars what they cost in total environmental impact

In which manufactory is mesitylene an active agent, waste product?

Now I see that it is a component of coal tar. Weren't the Polish and the German using natural gas? And didn't they switch back to coal only after a combination of extremely retarded policies got recently found out?

Per Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesitylene:

> Mesitylene is a colorless liquid with sweet aromatic odor. It is a component of coal tar, which is its traditional source. It is a precursor to diverse fine chemicals.

> Mesitylene is mainly used as a precursor to 2,4,6-trimethylaniline, a precursor to colorants. This derivative is prepared by selective mononitration of mesitylene, avoiding oxidation of the methyl groups.[9]

> Mesitylene is used in the laboratory as a specialty solvent. In the electronics industry, mesitylene has been used as a developer for photopatternable silicones due to its solvent properties.

Colorants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colourant

I wouldn't be too quick to lay the blame at mesitylene yet. I'm still seeing conflicting reports: https://www.dw.com/en/mysterious-mass-fish-kill-in-oder-rive...

> At the time, the Lower Silesia Water Authority based in the nearby Polish city of Wroclaw detected a toxic substance in two locations on the Oder that is likely the solvent mesitylene, which is known to have a toxic effect on fish. However, subsequent tests have shown no trace of the substance.

Doesn't the stuff flow away, down the river? Test further downstream right?

Maybe the perpetrator stopped dumping it when it became a news story? Like, they started dumping it recently and when they realized they were the cause to a catastrophe they stopped to try to avoid blame.

The problems of greed, disregard for others' suffering, and avoidance of responsibility are universal aspects of the human psyche. The Soviet Union and People's Republic of China have a legacy of industrial pollution at least as damning as any capitalist country:

https://www.gerdludwig.com/stories/soviet-pollution-a-lethal...

https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/china39s-polluted-ri...

Reporters are routinely arrested in communist Vietnam for reporting on industrial pollution:

https://cpj.org/2016/05/two-journalists-arrested-while-cover...

As you suggest, the best known solution is identifying these externalities, exposing their abuse through a free press, and holding polluters accountable through collective action.

From Washington Post,

Scientists have speculated that factors beyond deliberate dumping could be at play. The mercury could have settled in the river’s sediment because of 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.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/13/poland-oder-...

BTW, article is viewable on Chrome with scripting turned off (NoScript).

Informed only by a degree in chemistry, it seems unlikely that either mesitylene or mercury stirred up from the sediment would cause such an acute event. The salt water mentioned in the Wikipedia articles seems substantially more plausible. But more facts will certainly improve our understanding.

The title is somewhat optimistic by not specifying the month, or an ordinal.

Optimistic? This isn't going to be over in a month.

Depending on the cause, this will take decades to centuries.

Yeah I rather meant the implicit assumption that there won't be another disaster in 2022 on the Oder.

I live near the river and so many rumors and stories on this flying around now. It’s the perfect storm of information negation and whataboutism and panic.

One immediate thing is certain in my surroundings though - a neighbors dog is at the vet poisoned from swimming in that river a few days back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32449865

Here's a first hand report from an activist: https://adamkoscielak.medium.com/how-greed-and-incompetence-...

All of the populist far-right parties seem to lean on "whataboutism" as their main explanation for everything. "We did something bad? But what about that time the other side also did something bad? Surely that means we are innocent?" At no point do they simply acknowledge how very sad this is. Poland is one of the most beautiful countries in the world, and yet it's being sacrificed to satisfy the greed of a few corporations.

From the Wikipedia page:

"The Polish government said that the perpetrators would be severely punished, however also blamed uninvolved opposition politicians Donald Tusk, Rafał Trzaskowski and compared the situation to other previous unrelated events in Warsaw and Gdańsk, where the opposition Civic Platform hold power. Grzegorz Witkowski, a government minister, as well as repeating the unfounded government claims, also blamed ecologists and stated that the river is safe to enter."

Grzegorz Witkowski is trying to bring back a pre-Gorbachev style of Communist communication. "The problem isn't that the river was poisoned, the problem is that ecologists have told people the river is poisoned."

Yeah just like a recession is not a recession and that inflation is now 0 apparently.

This is all statism 101, the state must survive above the nation.

In the state television on main news programme they basically played a 3 minute clip saying for about a minute that something happened with the river and other two slamming opposition for an incident on other river that is not really comperable in extens or even response. They driely mentioned though that the prime minister fired a few officials and ended with a jab at Germans.

No need to downvote the parent, this really is an accurate representation of what the state television looks like in one of the European Union's democracies and how this disaster is being portrayed there. If you're in other parts of Europe, you may be unhappy with some of the media in your country as well, you may even think they're biased, but you're really not prepared for what TVP is these days.

"Poland is one of the most beautiful countries in the world, and yet it's being sacrificed to satisfy the greed of a few corporations."

Is that what's happened here?

I've never had a comment on Hacker News that went up and down as much as this one. Up to 9 points at one point, then back to 1, then back up to 7, right now at 3 points. Interesting that this one apparently brings out very strong for and against responses.

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