2010-11-05

Hungary: Leak apparent months before sludge spill

Vatic Note:   Does this not sound like our  Gulf?  I am putting a lot of these foreign nations situations up here for all to see how global this already is.   What they are doing in Hungary they already did here, and what they are doing in Brazil on a different level,  again they already did fully here.  

In the Gulf, remember there was a warning and notice by the employees to management in the gulf of a possible blow out due to leaks and problems and mgmnt ignored the problem, rather they shorted their stocks in BP assuming the blowout would occur and sure enough it did and they made millions off the accident. Well, here we are in Hungary and its the same thing with respect to early warnings and nothing done.

What do these two events have in common??? Rothschild. In the gulf it was Rothschilds Goldman sucks that knew about the coming blow out and chose to trade stocks and make millions instead of fixing it. Research would need to be done on the company involved in the Hungary accident, so called, but I would bet my last dollar Rothschild people are involved in the ownership and board level exec decision level, who either allowed this to happen or caused it to happen. If Hungary has decent leadership, an investigation will be done on both trading in stocks on this accident and on the lack of clean up as is evident from the picture below.

Here is a video of what happened in Hungary and the towns that were flooded with the toxic red sludge. Just to remind you of what can happen when a corporation ignores warnings of serious problems as this company did. Is it owned by Rothschild in some way like BP was through Goldman sachs???



http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=163787853


Hungary: Leak apparent months before sludge spill
http://www.thespec.com/news/world/article/266670--leak-apparent-months-before-sludge-spill
Wed Oct 13 2010, by Associated Press through "The Spec.com"

BUDAPEST, HUNGARY An aerial photo taken months before a gigantic reservoir unleashed torrents of toxic sludge shows a faint red trail trickling through the container wall — part of a growing body of evidence that inspectors who gave the pit a clean bill of health may have missed warning signs.

Police were examining the photo Tuesday as part of an investigation into how part of the wall containing the 10 million cubic meters (350 million cubic feet) of caustic slurry could have given way without structural weaknesses being detected by a team of inspectors from the government environmental agency who inspected the container pond less than two weeks before the spill.

Disaster commissioner Gyorgy Bakondi, appointed to the newly created post Monday night, said Tuesday the inspections were under investigation, including claims by environmental inspectors that “they had found everything in order.”

As the police probe gathered steam, judicial authorities scheduled a court appearance for Zoltan Bakonyi, the managing director of MAL Rt., or the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company, the company that owned the reservoir, to decide whether he should be formally charged, if so, with what, and whether he should remain in custody.

The photo showing an apparent leak of red sludge on the northern wall of the reservoir — the same wall that partially collapsed eight days ago — was taken by Interspect, a Hungarian company specializing in aerial photography that invests some of its profits on environmental projects, such as taking photos of locations in Hungary which could be at environmental risk.

Interspect director Gabor Bako said he shot the photo June 11, nearly 4 months before the spill. He said the company shared the photo with universities and environmental groups “but no further steps were taken in the matter” until the wall collapsed freeing the caustic muck that flooded three west Hungarian villages about 170 kilometres (just over 100 miles) from Budapest before being carried by local waterways into the Danube River.

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 The Associated Press, still hoping to gather experts who could review the photos.

Bakonyi, the managing who was taken into police custody Monday, was scheduled to appear at a preliminary court hearing Wednesday convening at Veszprem, a western Hungarian city about 45 kilometres (27 miles) east of the partially collapsed containment pond.

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.

There was no official information on what Bakonyi told police, with law enforcement officials declining to divulge details on the progress of their investigation a week after the start of their probe.

But according to the daily Blikk, a lead engineer at MAL Rt., told police that the firm’s top management was aware — but kept quiet — about the risks of a breach of the reservoir for an unspecified period.

The tabloid also revealed that in the 1980s, before the fall of the Iron Curtain, Bakony’s father, Arpad Bakonyi, was the head of the environmental department at the ministry of industry — a predecessor of the present-day inspectorate — and received several state awards for his work.

In an initial reaction after the spill, Zoltan Bakonyi said the reservoir was patrolled daily and “did not show any physical signs that something of this nature could happen.” But Prime Minister Viktor Orban suggested that preliminary investigations revealed negligence playing a part.

“We have well-founded reasons to believe that there were people who knew about the dangerous weakening of the reservoir wall, but for personal reasons they thought it wasn’t worth repairing and hoped there’d be no trouble,” Orban said.

Bakondi, the disaster commissioner, said that police had taken over security tasks at all premises belonging to the company and that production at the plant could restart during the weekend, although a final decision had yet to be made.

Bakondi leads an 18-member supervisory committee, who will have to approve practically everything happening at MAL from now on.

A corner of the reservoir at the alumina plant in Ajka, 160 kilometres (100 miles) southwest of Budapest, the capital, collapsed last Monday, releasing an estimated 700,000 cubic meters (184 million gallons) of a highly caustic byproduct of alumina production, which is then used to make aluminum.

The Ajkai Timfoldgyar plant, which began operating in 1943, was sold to private investors in the 1990s in the wake of the collapse of communism.

MAL has a 12 per cent market share in Europe of alumina production and 4 per cent globally.It says it spent 30.3 billion forints ($153 million) in the past decade on maintenance and renovation work.Media reports say it had revenues of nearly 29 billion forints ($147 million) in 2009 and 50 billion forints ($253 million) in 2007.

The Associated Press

Related articles:

Hungary evacuates Kolontar Village fearing new Toxic sludge leak: http://www.silobreaker.com/hungary-evacuates-kolontar-village-fearing-new-toxic-sludge-leak-5_2263783102079827977

Hungarian Prime Minister says sludge reservoir wall likely to collapse http://www.silobreaker.com/hungarian-prime-minister-say-sludge-reservoir-wall-likely-to-collapse-5_2263783108522278987

Hungarians "flee" amid new sludge fears http://www.silobreaker.com/hungarians-flee-amid-new-sludge-fears-5_2263783104227311638



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