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Comment by machinekob | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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