Environmental Pollution

Minuscule amounts of cyanide may kill the aquatic life of a river, turning the whole ecosystem into a dead water course. The mine ponds can leak or overflow, posing threats to underground drinking water supplies and the wildlife otherwise thriving in lakes and streams. Birds as well as other animals are poisoned by drinking the polluted water.

Example: The cyanide solution (120 tons) that escaped in 2000 from a gold processing plant at Baia Mare in Romania would have been sufficient to kill one billion people. In just a few days, almost all aquatic life from 700 km of river waters in Romania and Hungary was totally destroyed. Numerous bird kills were also reported.

Lessons from Baia Mare Spill

In January 2000, an estimated 100,000 cubic meters of cyanide and metal-laced waste water spilled from a Romanian gold-processing facility situated near the town of Baia Mare. It killed much of the aquatic life in the Tisza River; a tributary of the Danube River. Fish were killed for hundreds of kilometres downstream the rivers; all the way from Romania, to Bulgaria, to Hungary and into Serbia. A preliminary report entitled Cyanide Spill at Baia Mare, Romania was prepared by the UNEP in March 2000 (see http://www.naturalresources.org/environment/baiamare).


The three important conclusions of the UNEP report were:
• The breach in the retention dam was probably caused by a combination of inherent design deficiencies in the process, unforeseen operating conditions and bad weather.
• Hungarian officials estimated that 1,240 tons of dead fish were present along the Tisza River after the spill.on• The cyanide plume was measurable at the Danube delta, four weeks later and 2,000 km from the spill source.