Poland’s prime minister said on Friday that “enormous amounts of chemical waste” were probably dumped intentionally into the Oder River, which flows along the border with Germany, causing such severe environmental damage that the river will take years to recover.
Been seen floating on the banks of the Oder or washed ashore for the past two weeks, but the issue only erupted into a major scandal late this week. , promised that the Polish authorities would hold the perpetrators accountable.
“Probably in full awareness of the risks and consequences, huge amounts of chemical waste were dumped into the Oder,” he said in a video on Facebook. “We will not let this matter arise. We will not rest until the guilty are severely punished.
German media have reported that the poison is mercury, although this has not been officially confirmed. Investigations into the cause of the mass fish kill are ongoing. first seen near the town of Ogawa in southwestern Poland in late July, along with dead animals such as beavers. .”This shows that we are dealing with a gigantic and scandalous ecological catastrophe,” he said at a news conference near the river, where officials clashed with angry residents.
Meanwhile, German officials complained that Poland had breached an international treaty by not immediately notifying them of possible contamination of the river. A ship’s captain drew the German authorities’ attention to the dead fish for the first time in August.
Ministry told reporters in Berlin. Stolzenberg said German authorities are in contact with their Polish counterparts to learn more about the situation and provide the requested assistance. Poland has deployed soldiers to help clean up the Oder River, and a fishermen’s association in Zielona Gora, a town in western Poland, said on Friday it would halt fishing in the river because of pollution.
According to Morawiecki, the level of pollution is so great that it can take the river’s ecosystem years to recover. Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak announced Thursday that soldiers and reservists are being deployed to help remove pollutants from the river, known in German as the Oder and in Polish and Czech as the Odra.
It flows hundreds of kilometers north from the Oder Mountains of the Czech Republic and empties into the Baltic Sea.