Company Head Arrested Over Sludge Torrent in Hungary

Company Head Arrested Over Sludge Torrent in Hungary
By DAN BILEFSKY
Copyright by Reuters
Published: October 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/world/europe/12hungary.html?_r=1&hp


BUDAPEST — The managing director of the company whose reservoir unleashed a lethal torrent of red sludge on three villages last week has been arrested, the Hungarian prime minister announced before Parliament on Monday.

The arrested man, Zoltan Bakonyi, works for MAL Zrt, the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company. He was not available for comment and a spokeswoman for Mal Zrt did not return phone calls.

A week ago, nearly 200 million gallons of toxic red mud — a byproduct of the conversion of bauxite to alumina, for aluminum — poured out of a reservoir after part of its containing wall collapsed, killing eight people and injuring hundreds more. Hundreds of people have been forced from their homes, and tens of millions of dollars in private property have been destroyed.

Updating Parliament on the government’s response, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said a new emergency law would be enacted in order to bring MAL Zrt under state control. He said a state commissioner would be appointed to manage the company and its assets.

As custodian of the company, he said the government would make sure it paid for damages. He said the government would also focus on saving jobs and identifying further risky industrial sites.

“We need to hold the company responsible for the red sludge spill under state control and its assets under state closure,” he told Parliament.

While some observers lauded the move, others accused the government of using the sludge catastrophe as a pretext to renationalize private industry and rule by decree. MAL Zrt was owned by the state during Communist times, before it was taken over by private investors after Communism fell in 1989.

Meanwhile, disaster management officials said that other cracks in the ruptured reservoir wall appeared to be contained for the moment.

Gyorgyi Tottos, spokeswoman for Hungary’s Catastrophe Protection Unit, said the cracks in the northern wall, which experts feared could collapse over the weekend, had not expanded overnight.

“I have just returned from the site and there are three gaps in the wall that are a half-meter wide and 20 meters long, which suggests that the wall will fall over time,” Ms. Tottos said. “But we are hoping that a concrete barrier we are building to contain the sludge, along with an emergency dam, will do their work and that the effects of the wall collapsing will be less dramatic than last time.”

Peter Szijjarto, the prime minister’s spokesman, told the broadcaster TV2 that he was hopeful that the dam would be finished by Tuesday. “We have 4,000 people and 300 machines working at the scene so we are doing our utmost to prevent another tragedy,” he said.

The government held a special meeting on Sunday to analyze the consequences of the disaster. Analysts said Mr. Orban’s center-right government, elected in a landslide earlier this year, was gaining a populist boon because the devastating rupture had inspired national unity and served to distract the country from its economic woes. They said Mr. Orban had moved quickly to take control of the situation and was fashioning himself as a Hungarian protector.