Toxic Slugde Flooded a Village
 

Hungary Toxic Sludge Spill - ABC News

/me shakes head. This... there's no words for it. :(

Indeed. Just saw it on the news today. The rivers run red like blood with the toxins from the site. Everything the river touches dies. I am speechless...
http://http://a.abcnews.com/images/I...101006_ssh.jpg

:'(

ayskxawng tawtute...

So far they've been unable to account for the dam's breach.

Toxic spill rescues continue - The Irish Times - Wed, Oct 06, 2010

Son of a... How much longer are we going to let this happen? How long? How long until we finally deal with crap like this once and for all? How long are we going to let tawtute rat bastards destory our planet like this? :'(

In situations like this, I just wanna take the people involved - from the corporate suits that made the sludge, to the politicians that let them dump it - and take them out back and smack the crap out of them. To just take some of these little snots, and work them over a bit.

^ This. :'(

...Jeez

That's gonna be around for a looooong time.

Hopefully it didn't get into any major waterways....if it did though, it's going to get much worse.

The company that owns the Aluminum plant is gonna be paying out the ass for this.

Wow, we suck... I know, it's always just "one more little area". Eventually though, we are going to wake up and find that we've done this kind of thing to the entire planet.

Really?

Do what my mum does when one of our cats spews on the carpet.
Grab their head, and rub their face in it! :awesome:

:hmm:

There's a difference between a cat puking on a rug, and a corporation half-assing and cutting corners for dealing with waste, and the corrupt politicians that turn a blind eye to their shenanigans. One does it because of a biological necessity, the other, because they're greedy tawtute.

Which is why you rub their face in toxic sludge..

Oh, that's what you were going after (my tone-of-post determining abilities usually crap our this time of night :P).

Yes, dunk the bastards. :angry:

Yes, then:
http://pawsru.org/fc/src/fc35234_Kil...ith%20Fire.gif

This is just awful, awful news. I hope the sludge does not spread and enter the Danube.

Not only is this a huge ecological catastrophe, it's a psychological one too:

Those who follow bad environmental practices ending up hurting more than they realize, I think.

:(

The Danube river - is that where it is heading to? If so, I will wail. That river goes through our state here, I visited it in the past, I cycled along it for a week to Vienna and enjoyed its company. My favourite books on a palaeolithic girl by Jean Auel have the setting of the untainted Danube river as the background. The river delta is a vast and beautiful and amazing ecosystem. If this goes there, this is like two river deltas damaged in one year (together with the mangroves of the missisippi). I didn't catch all the news yet, but something like this is bound to happen again.
As a geologist I know a bit about mining and while of course the tailings are in these days not simply dumped, the sludges are held back by dams - and dams can break for a number of reasons.
And the distinction between human error and natural disaster is just crap - If humans build a dam to hold the sludge back and that dam eventually for some reason breaks it is human error - not of an individual who pressed the wrong button but human error in general. And from that perspective, almost all disasters are human made. Even a hurricane disaster of a flood is, because people just build houses that are not adapted to the region in places that are unsuitable for settlement! Oh there are so many geologists jokes on that - frustrated jokes - jokes on people who have been warned over and over not to build anything in a place and are rewarded for ignoring that advice by some disaster that they then call natural. What about San Francisco. When will it happen? Eventually it will, you know? At some point in time, the Quake will hit the city, people will die, buildings will crash. Then geologists can once more say "told you so", but that is no reason for anyone to even think about it for a moment. They are all just hoping it will play out nice. And that is the attitude people have in soooo many areas - trash the planet and hope it will recover, build some crap and hope it holds, use some toxic stuff and hope someone will find a solution to set it right later (like with nuclear power). This whole society is based so much on hope, that it makes me sick. I know thea are usually the ones telling me to "get real", but that very words is what I want to shout back at them!

Hungary: Toxic red sludge has reached the Danube

:'(

It hasn't hit the part of the river that I've seen (I've cycled along it too in Austria) but I'm still very saddened to hear about this.

You mention San Francisco - I fear for all my friends who live and hail from there, and I can only hope that whatever buildings they may be residing in when the time comes have been retrofitted at the very least.

:'(
I really hope those responsible pay for this... not that it will undo the damage... :(

Ugh. This is utterly dreadful.

Oh sweet jesus.:'(

Humanity really is batting 1000 this year environmentally, aren't we?:facepalm:

I read about this a couple days ago while I was sitting in the van as my mom and sister went inside a store. I opened up Twitter on my iPhone and saw this so I followed the link and read the horrible news. :(

It's really unfortunate that stuff like this can happen. It's caused significant damage. Also, there was a dead cat in one of the pictures. :(

The company who is responsible for this is screwed.

Yeah. I hope they are made to physically help clean it up. Because after all, we can't take enough of their money, but we damn sure can take their time. :war:

First there was the Deepwater Horizon, and now this. If I'm not mistaken, I think that this spill is larger than the oil spill by several hundred thousand gallons. :(

Yeah - this year has quite some strikes in that area. Not that there have not been many others in the past years that have gone unnoticed but I think the awareness is higher for once and I really think that as industrialization increases, complexity grows, the point of diminishing returns is passed (meaning to get more resources we have to take higher risks and invest more energy than ever) these things will just increase. Especially as countries that cannot afford (due to the economic system and the very nature of complexity and diminishing returns) protective measurements ramp up industrialization (and we "westerners" cannot blame it on them as it is the consumption in our countries that requires this mining)

The spill there is of course much different from the oil spill in some aspects - at least the gallon-count cant be compared, but one thing is sure - the immediately affected areas are just dead and depending on the toxicity and heavy metal content of the sludge may not really ever be cleaned up completely. I still have some hope that the Danube may prevail, but it seems they have to dump stuff into her already to prevent worse and that is not a good sign. It reminds too much of the planes spraying dispersants over the gulf in early summer....

This is unfathomable... The newspapers in my country have been covering this pretty extensively, and the last news I read was that the river which was hit by the sludge first is dead. No life left whatsoever. I am seriously pessimistic about this - I've seen firsthand what even a tiny bit of pollution can do to a water system (estensive logging/clearcutting of an area where the ground is rich in iron oxide - killed all life in the stream that ran past my previous home, the water looked pretty much the same as it does in the hungarian river - just red toxic sludge).

Btw, I guess you've all heard about Vedanta by now? They have a dam just like this one but larger in a rural area in (i think it is) Tamil Nadu in india.

Doesn't it just make you want to scream at someone? We humans are killing ourselves and everything around us with our apathy.

Huge oil spill? Meh. Injecting carcinogens into the ground in search of natural gas? So what. Toxic waste? Whatever. Whaling in Antarctica and seal hunting in the Arctic? Uh huh.
:facepalm:

Ah Vedanta again. Our cozy RDA equivalent from the "real life Avatar" situation earlier this year :(

But as always - they are not alone. There are thousands and thousands of such dams - all over the world. For all kinds of minings tailings. And it is not just metals they contain. They contain the waste of processing. Ore these days is mined in low quality, so to get the ore out of the rock, the rock is ground to small pieces, then it is dumped into basins into which a secret chemical is added. Then these basins are bubbled. The chemical forms foam and attaches to the ore minerals. So the foam contains the minerals and can be used further, the residue settles at the bottom of the basin and is then pumped out into the tailings basin behind the dam, chemicals, unwanted minerals, heavy metals all in place and due to the grinding all that stuff is highly reactive as the surface was increased by orders of magnitude.

Oh sorry - just dumped in some first hand experience her, that made me turn away from economic geology during university...

Well - nature can fix a lot, but people dont even allow for that. It is incredible - humans dump toxic pesticides in the environment that never existed naturally and microbes develop within decades that degrade them and clean up. But if you beat on and on, take away the means to recover - how it this healing to happen? You just need forests and phytoplancton to turn CO2 into O2 again. Taking away 50% of the forests and with human impact diminishing phytoplancton by about as much within 50 years - who the f* is going to take away all the excess CO2 pumped into the atmosphere? This culture is almost systematically destroying this planets life support system - in terms of a war, it does not just attack one target, it also cuts the supply lines and eliminates the means of production of supplies. So it pumps CO2 into the air and takes away the means of turning that CO2 into O2 again and poisoning the soil and water so that these means cannot just grow back. It not only blocks rivers with dams and prevents fish to reach their breeding grounds, it also poisons the rivers with endocrine disruptors, drains the wetlands for residential development or farmland and of course people catch the fish for food.

So which one is worse? I say certainly not people going fishing or even seal hunting for food. The've been doing this for tens of thousands of years. But the sheer scale for example of commercial fishing and the multitude of accompanying factors are insane.

And the sad part is: We as a race could live just fine without doing these horrible things. :'(

Yeah, but "fine" is not good enough for some, hmm?

But yeah - that revelation was what turned me away from beeing a misantropic person. People always think of me that way for me bashing these topics. But looking into some things - lives of native people, anthropology - that convinced me that it is not humanity that is somehow "evil". That it is not "a virus". I argued about that statement of famous "Agent Smith" a lot and wont repeat it here.

Humans have the ability to be like that - to be "evil" and destroy the world and once a certain set of memes come up, the path is set and it does not look good. But if you step aside from that mindset for a moment despite people who are still encroached within that set of memes calling you "idealist" - one can see the possibilities. Peaceful societies in the present and past, existing in a natural balance, often even refusing and resisting the memes that this culture is so fixed on: development, growth, technotopia, hierarchy, monuments, ...

No, it turns out I really like humans. It is something else that I dont like and that is something not all humans have...

I agree with you there. It's not that I don't like humans, it just the Na'vi seem to have a lot of the things.... a lot of the things we humans have somehow lost or buried. I don't like humans that are inhuman, which is a majority of society. I believe there's still hope for us, but it's a faint glimmer.

I would rather be a Na'vi than a human for sure, but that doesn't mean that I've completely shoved humanity out the airlock. I acknowledge the fact that we humans need to change. But some don't. They're content to sit on their arses and rake in the profits at the expense of the planet they're sitting on. Those are the people that need to be changed, or failing that, stopped, at any cost because they are killing the rest of us.

Yes, I admit I am a misanthrope. I want more than anything to be one of the Na'vi. To be surrounded by people that think the way I do, to be on Pandora, to thrive off the land.

Well, I don't consider myself to be a misanthrope (not anymore at least), but I do consider myself extremely, extremely anti-authority. After a lot of study and thought, I've come to realize that the root of the problem is not the masses of society, it is the elite. It is the few extremely rich, and extremely powerful rat bastards that run the world, and their apologists in the mainstream media. The masses have been purposely made ignorant, so that they will act as resistanceless pawns, to the advance of the elite on their own lives and the well being of the planet. We've been taught not to question, to simply believe everything we see, even if it is the noose that will be eventually be used to hang us all. Any glimmer of hope that people might have is usally quickly extinguished in a flurry of propaganda.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. In a society with a triangular hierarchy, never think that authority has your best interests in mind. Up until the Enlightenment, authority ruled the world with a fascist, corporatist, theocratic, totalitarian system, and they desperately want it back again. They want a world of cheap, ignorant labor that they can exploit to the death for the sake of their own well being, and they want to be able to strip and demolish and drill the world to oblivion for the same reason. They want a system of Neo-fuedalism, in a world where they can drill what they want, blast what they want, pump out what they want, and dump what they want, and if anybody has the audacity to speak out, they'll either 1) "disappear" or 2) get publicly executed. 1984 is a masturbatory aid to some of these sons of bitches.

So yeah, I have gone from hating people in general, to pitying them, while at the same time wishing a slow, painful death on the rich, powerful sons of bitches that truly deserve that kind of fate. They deserve to be lined up, and shot, one-by-one, and I dream of being the one to pull the trigger. Other than being a Na'vi, being able to take part in a global revolution is one of the dreams I long for the most. In the words of Mike Malloy, when the lights go out, there's a few out there that I want personally.:war:

Plus something else by Malloy. It's about American corporations specifically, but it doesn't really matter anymore because they all act the same, wherever they are...:(

Meanwhile, the toxic spill is not over: "new cracks may cause the wall to collapse or spring additional leaks", evidence hardens that there were signs of leakage before the spill and that these signs show up at numerous sites in Hungary: "Although Interspect found many suspicious sites around the country, 'we're not construction engineers or specialists who could interpret what the picture showed,' he told". And of course there was no plan in case this would happen, so "A police statement issued Tuesday suggested Bakonyi was guilty of negligence, saying he did not prepare an emergency warning and rescue plan to be implemented in case of an incident like the sludge spill" - But just a day later they let the guy go. At least the government took over the company. But why is it that in the end always the government (the people) have to clean up the mess? What was that idea about investment to finance expensive projects - wasnt that supposed to ensure that there are enough finances to clean up such a mess?

EDIT: Oh and they apparently found a nice solution what to do with the millions of tons of such sludge produced each year - mix it with equally toxic waste from oil production to form a "less toxic" sludge:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1013122603.htm
Now on with replies: /EDIT

Well - we agree on almost everything here then :D
My opinion of "what can be done" is not clear. I am not clear who or what causes the whole mess and what is the most efficient way to get away from it. Who or what causes it? Is it some few greedy bastards "up there" who exploit the ones below? Certainly. Is it the ones in the middle, the average civilized person who wants do drive a car and have a TV and consumes 60 times as much energy as most people of the world? Certainly. Is it the (corporate) media that propagate that way of life even to the farthest resgions of the world? Certainly. Is it a hierarchy, that allows corporations to be formed, rich people to be rich and the "big men" to be big? Definitely. Is it the culture of civilization itself, agriculture, surpluses, ...? Most likely.
The problem I see is, that even if one manages to convince some of the "people in power" that they need to change, they quickly shift position and other people will take their place, holding the same opinions as before. I once said, it is not people who choose the job they want to do, it is the Job who chooses the people that fit into it. A CEO of a corporation will always act the same - if you kick him out, the next will be the same. if he starts to act kindly, we will loose his job and someone else with the "right attitude" takes over.
This may again be a bit misanthropic, but people usually are not in power over the actions that happen. We like to think that people can change the world, and sometimes they can, but as long as there will be corporations, there will be CEOs that act greedy. As long as there are cars and cheap oil, people will use that and as long as you are encouraged and rewarded for striving for money and power, people will go for that. It would take an immense self-control to not do that ba an immense number of people. Clearly this is not happening.
So what is the conclusion of this - I am not totally sure, just that asking the ones in power nicely to change their ways or tediously convincing the middle class to give up some of their comforts is not going to work.
What I think has more power is to make people aware of the fact that their life is not in fact the best there is. That the cycle of commute, work, eat, watch TV, sleep, commute,... is not "life" - that it is a bad replica of life. Many know this, the poor know it, the ones who work and do not earn a lot know this. Even middle class people know this in their heart. They strive to material wealth to get some happiness back, but thats not working in the long run. So once people are aware of that situation, they need an alternative. A good one, one that gives them more than they would loose by leaving their current way of life behind. If that alternative is not there, people will not change. Some people of course say, that if the system itself is attacked directly by "any means neccesary", people would also have to change. But even the greatest eco-warrior cant take down the system head on. Activists chaining themselves to trees or protesting can slow down some destruction, they can raise awareness, but I dont really see them succeeding :( - I heard the quote "we need it all" and I think that is true - people setting up new ways of life, showing these ways to people, experimenting with new ways - but also taking the system headon - throw shoes into the cogworks and such ;) - slow the fracking destruction down. If that makes sense.

YouTube - You Are With Us

I wouldn't go as far as to wish anyone dead, but I'm right there with you. One way or another, there's a few ratbags out there that I don't want to ever see the light of day again. :war:


Oh joy. We now have a vat 2x as large with 2x as many types of chemicals. How does that make it any less toxic? :facepalm:

Yes, it makes sense. And I agree 100%.

Oh, and is there a BSG quote in there somewhere?

I love ToS. :)

I did have hope, but things like this make me lose that... Even if some people realise and they change, it only takes a few to ruin all the progress made :(

That is WHY I feel like giving up on humanity sometimes... Because it needs everyone to make any real difference. Some people will never care :(

Definitely... but for me, it has to be Pandora... I couldn't pretend everything was OK on Earth while all around me, everyone else was still carrying on the same as ever :(
I am definitely a misanthrope, not against humans in general, but certainly against the vast majority of them. The people who profit from destruction of the world, from war, from overpopulation. The companies who throw people's lives away for more money. The people who have no respect for other people's lives or freedom. I hate them and I never want to be like that, that is why I hate being even associated with them at all.

Sadly, it's true...

If everyone realised what was going on and decided they want change, it WOULD happen... but everyone just sits there, thinking they should but scared nobody else does, and nothing ever happens. Very few people are truly happy and satisfied with the way the world is, and they are, almost without exception, the ones who benefit form other people's misfortune and the destruction of our world for profit.

You and me both... When things change, I know I will be there. When everyone realises what's been going on for generations and how nothing ever improves.

So yes, I am a misanthrope, and I'd love to leave this all behind and be Na'vi... but if I can't, I want to change things here. The problem is just getting people to. A small group of people will just look crazy, and everyone will think 'they've got a point, but they'll never do anything'... If all those people joined in, there would be no limits :(

You kinda have to start small though.

As far as changing/saving/purging the world goes, I think a few good ideas have been mentioned, yet I still am always asking myself - how do we even begin to do it.

I hate being a person who sits on his ass in the status quo, but often I just don't know what to do. Sometimes it all seems futile, and that we'll all just get what we deserve in the end. :(

Yeah, same here. I'm waiting for an opportunity to change something for the better.

Like I said, the hope is there, you just need a microscope to see it. :(


I agree. Let me clarify: I want more than anything to be a Na'vi on Pandora. :)

This deserves to be quoted for absolute truth. Basically everything I wanted to say, you said, just in better words. Great minds think alike. :)

Well - it makes it less caustic, I guess. And the heavy metals precipitate a bit easier from the water into the sludge. But that was about it from what I read.

Ah you mean "So say we all"? :D - Didnt think of that, no ...

Yes, that is so true. The ones who are happy are the few who profit the most, the ones who are truely happy are the ones who are not caught up yet in the system. Everyone in between has some discontent, I would dare say. Sure - not all is bleak - most people have times of happiness. For industrialized people this may be a new shiny car, a faster computer, a new PC game or a vacation in a beautiful place, or learning to fly or going hiking. For a person in the "developing countries" it may be moving into a bigger flat, getting a better paid job, getting a TV or even a car or scooter. For someone in the "underdeveloped" countries it may simply be food and water. But in general, so much of this happiness is artificial - it is created by first inciting a need for something and then fulfilling this. First take away freedom, a place to live, food and then sell it back to the people.

Well - I think a first start is, that people start talking about it instead of ignoring it all. Start to think about what CAN be done. That is already something. More people can be united that way, people can be brought to wake up.
Then it gets hairy - most people are scared and that is the tactics of course. Scare people into believing that without the system they would die miserably. This is coming from all directions and the scale of it, once one can identify it, is huge. Terrorism is of course the scare of the day, but it goes on with scaring people about crime, drugs, becoming jobless and homeless. People are scared by the phantom of child molesting and accidents to a point the children are only allowed to play with their PS3 instead of going anywhere. When it comes to nature, we get things like that natives life a life that is "nasty, brutish and short", that nature is dangerous, causes allergies, contains poisonous plants and animals that can bite you and make you ill. Then we have stupid books like "the lord of the flies" that everyone gets to read in school and that fortifies the idea that humans are innately flawed creatures that turn into monsters the moment they go away from civilization.
This is all aimed to give the people the feeling that they need the system, that they would suffer and die if they do anything differently, that without the control of the system they would all start eating each other alive. So people start - out of fear - to really love the system and really love the control and opression. Its completely bonkers! People in the UK actually complain about not beeing controlled in all public places by CCTV cameras! My sister once told me that she would allow cameras to be installed in her home (if they also are installed in all other homes) if that makes her safer and helps catching terrorists. :angry: "1984" was NOT meant to be an instruction manual for Eywas sake!!!

Now the general problem - uniting people for one cause - that is THE major issue with all revolutionary ideas and the lack of this happening is the reason we are in this predicament now. Of course - if all people would stop shooting others in wars, if all people would stop using cars and coal electricity, if all people would work together rather than compete, if all people would eat less meat, if all people would give food to the ones who need it - then the world would be a better place. It is always like that - the trouble is that never will all people agree on anything. And the other, even bigger problem is, that the system is rigid enough to reinforce itself - people are caught in a net of fear, seperation, false individualism that is in fact loneliness and are provided with an easy way to follow. Most people will always choose the easy way. Give people an easy way, a default procedure and they follow.
From that, I conclude two possibilities. Either get enough people to get active - to not go the "easy" way because they see it is wrong and in the long term not easy after all. Or present people with a way that is as easy as the default. The first would be to convince people that we are heading for a catastrophe - in ecological and human perspectives. People start to awake already - the more crap happens, the more people become aware that this is not the right way. Then, a better way has to be shown. Politics and Corporations present one: Drive hybrid cars, conserve water, carbon trading, hydropower energy, wind turbines, GMO food to feed the billions, ... - but most of these are for the rich only and they ignore the human perspective altogether, firmly holding to the principle of hierarchy. Can we present another one? One that gives people as much hope and prospect as the default ones? Developing this model is important. Presenting people with a way to live that is more rewarding, more free, more happy than their present ones and making it easy to go there. How can that be done, that I believe is the question, isn't it?

And now I got waaaay off topic ;)

Don't worry about going off topic, you provided a lot for me to think about. Now I just have to figure out this:

:P

I'd say more, but then I myself would be going off topic...

UPDATE:
'Red mud' disaster's main threat to crops is not toxic metals, but instead high alkalinity
So not the metals or radioactivity are to worry about, they do not impact production as much as the alkalinity. Don't worry about the metal content in the crops too much or about what effect the radioactivity has on the plants. If the legal limits are reached, we'll just use the stuff to feed animals, burn it as biofuel or just mix it with clean drops so that the overall concentration is lower again, right? Bastards!

Do you have a better suggestion?