The Ajka red mud spill in western Hungary in October 2010 was the largest documented release of alumina industry by-products into the environment, with around 1 million m3 of red mud suspension breaching the failed depository wall [1]. However, there is no information available about the clear up operation which The Magyar Aluminiumtermelõ és Kereskedelmi Zrt. India: countrywide lockdown by farmers – towards an indefinite general strike! It may be that the state authorities are too weak and don’t care or – more likely – there is collusion of a political nature through corruption and personal commercial interest. Air photo of the broken dam by DigitalGlobe. Pride Promotes Strife. Despite the closeness in form and colour, there's no connection between the phrases 'in the red' and 'in the pink'. Zoltan Illes, Hungary’s state secretary for the environment, did not exclude the possibility the state may eventually take over MAL. In those few cases where these clauses were included, nobody since then cared about or enforced its provisions. An aerial photo taken on Oct. 8, 2010, shows the ruptured wall of a red sludge reservoir of the Ajkai Timfoldgyar plant in Kolontar, Hungary. The trade union movement was all but obliterated and is still at a very low level for an EU country. The night before he had won an election to become Devecser's third mayor since the fall of communism in Hungary. ÁNTSZ (The State Public Health Authority) announced on 5th October that the mud is not toxic. The mudflow was two metres high and covered an area 40 sq km. The value of 11.8 pH from 1987 is drastically inaccurate considering the measurement taken since 4th October 2010 in Kolontár of 13.5pH. are well known for their closeness to certain political circles, one of them having had a joint venture in the past with Ferenc Gyurcsány, a former Prime Minister). With the excuse of the need for modernisation valuable state assets were wholesale stripped and passed on to those close to the powerful up on high. Looking at the pictures and the now slowly appearing analysis data of the red mud, there is no doubt this sludge has not been cleaned up. Hungary has 4 reservoirs in which to store this by-product of aluminium production, most of which is threatening populated areas and major rivers. Then we can make it certain that all our public institutions use local produce. Utilization of red mud with the recovery of valuable metal contents Dr. Kozéky László Synpetrol Hungary Inc. 4 Detailed composition of the red mud continuously produced even nowadays in the alum earth production factory of MAL in Ajka (Hungary) is shown in Tables 3 and 4. According to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) there are no toxic heavy metals in the mud. Ned Stafford/Hamburg, Germany Hungarian government officials commemorated the first anniversary of the country’s worst industrial accident yesterday. Baseball rubbing mud is mud used to treat balls in the sport of baseball to give pitchers better control and a firmer grip on the balls. (The owners of MAL Zrt. Within minutes the town was overcome: cars washed down streets and residents lay stricken on the roofs of their ruined homes. You can now choose to mix and apply these yummy de-saturated hues (we won’t call them “mud” anymore), when you want them in your work. But should you and I pay for something that was caused by negligence, the pursuit of profit and a callous disregard for even the most elementary safety standards in an industry long recognised as a major polluter of land, air and water? 4 Where do [] wars and fights come from among you? We will get back to you as soon as possible. Champagne had flowed. Before the use of rubbing mud, baseballs were rubbed in a mixture of water and infield soil, but this method usually discolored the ball's leather surface. From an environmental disaster zone, Devecser has become a model town for sustainable energy. Get rid of him and the system he represents, and you will never need to donate a penny again to disaster funds! Delaware River, the general vicinity of the source of baseball rubbing mud. Each summer a team of 12 workers cuts down the poplars and puts them through two mulching machines, which cost Devecser €15,000 (£12,500) each. The after effects of the 2010 red mud spill that threatened to poison great swathes of the Hungarian countryside have turned out to be far less harmful than scientists originally feared. XXI CONGRESSO DI SINISTRA CLASSE RIVOLUZIONE – È un momento eccezionale per essere dei rivoluzionari! Only the bricks used to build the houses weren't sourced locally, a blot that clearly irks Tamás: a local brickmaker, whose factory billows beyond the new-builds, couldn't make bricks for Devecser's biting winter. Hungary: workers and students fight together against Orbán, Hungary: major protests against “slave law”, Hungarian elections: Orbán's victory through fear, The Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 - The Forgotten Revolution, Hungary: Orbán's plebiscite falls flat as millions stay at home. Three years later, Tamás is standing atop Devecser's parish hall looking out on a new park marking the ruined area. (The pH scale is exponential, so a value of 9pH is 10 times more caustic than 8pH!). That environmental disaster, which received far less media attention than Hungary’s red-mud spill, left 2.5 million people temporarily without safe drinking water. Why red was chosen to mark debt isn't clear. The red colour of Uluru is due to the oxidation or the rusting of the iron-bearing minerals within the rock as it has sat there in the desert air for hundreds of thousands of years, said Dr Bradshaw. Photograph: Tomas Benedikovic/isifa/Getty Images, An aerial view of the broken dyke of a reservoir containing red sludge from aluminium factory is seen near Ajka on 8 October 2010. As you can see in this link the holding ponds are only a short distance from the town of Kolontal, the town that suffered a 6-8ft wave of red mud sludge that … It's something Tamas, who worked seven days a week and slept just three hours each night for two years after the flood, registers with muted pride. The possibilities for utilization and processing of red mud Health and safety at work is practically non-existent, in spite of the millions of words in laws which are never enforced. No, no and again NO! Another 180 will be built by 2017, adding 52m tons of capacity. 3 November 2014 by Tom Marshall. Плівки Порошенка: що переговори з Байденом і Путіним кажуть нам про імперіалізм в Україні? Clays include the kaolinite of red ultisol and are usually made up of complex silicate minerals. I've told people I use it in my garden, I use it for my rose bushes, I use it for bee stings and poison ivy and any kind of story. In Greek mythology, according to Pseudo-Apollodorus, Prometheus molded men out of water and earth. He also demanded that the government forces MAL Zrt. So production of the red mud goes on unhindered with its method of storage unchanged. Another interesting feature of this crisis has been governmental attitudes which show a demand for strict punishment of those responsible, while calling on the population to pray and donate freely. The Clean Air Working Party’s warnings have so far remained unanswered by the authorities. But it had burst, and a million cubic metres of the slime was rushing toward Devecser, with waves of up to two metres. A toxic spill of red sludge has cascaded through dozens of villages in Hungary, killing seven and injuring scores. If there are really heavy metals in the mud they can be dissolved by the acids dumped in the water and pollute both the soil and the river downstream. 100 Hungarian people from Hungary and 97 Hungarian-speaking Szekler people from Transylvania in present-day Romania were genetically tested. “It means nothing!” said one of them, “We have those in my factory but accidents are still frequent due to unsafe equipment and even more unsafe working practices”. In other parts of the world this mud is further utilised by extracting its valuable content, like its alkaline base to reuse in the production process. (MAL) has contractual obligations to carry out. The scourge of red mud burst into the public’s eye in October 2010 when a settling pond in Hungary ruptured. "The mayor is superhuman," says Jennervé Pál Szilvia, director of a local kindergarten. Do they not come from your desires for pleasure () that war in your members? Photo: Ádám Marácz Greenpeace was scathing about the government and all authorities that have tried to belittle the dangers and kept the public in the dark with misinformation. If you ask me how Hungarian people look like, it would be hard for me to find a stereotype to describe them. One thing is sure: those that got rich producing aluminium since 1995 in and around Ajka cannot make the surrounding population pay for the environmental harm their industry had done to them. The exact content of the red flood that killed seven and injured nearly 150 people, inundating several villages over more than a thousand hectares (2500 acres) on the 4th October, is still not clear. Overnight the world has woken up to intimate knowledge of the process of extracting aluminium from bauxite and its by-product the red mud, which devastated several villages, including Kolontár and Devecser, in the SouthWest of Hungary on Monday, 4th October 2010, bringing with it a long term threat of environmental pollution in several countries. It pointed out that the approximately 30 million tons of this material is long overdue for neutralisation and its containers/reservoirs for recultivation. No way! The mud is highly basic with a pH ranging from 10 to 13. In their statements to the foreign press, however, they seem to play down the seriousness of the crisis. Hungarian people are actually followers of the ancient people living in the area for thousands of years before Magyars conquered Panonia. 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