BUND water expert Sascha Maier estimates the number of fish that have died in the Oder in recent days at up to 100 tonnes. The expert from the environmental organization told the German Press Agency on Monday that this is a projection based on reports from individual collection campaigns. The environmental catastrophe affected the Oder in an extension of about 500 kilometers. The publication “Riffreporter” had previously reported on this. Since Friday, firefighters have recovered about 80 tons of dead fish from the river, the spokesman for Poland’s professional fire chief said on Monday.
The scale is comparable to the Sandoz disaster of 1986, Maier told DPA. At that time, a fire broke out in a Swiss warehouse of the chemical company Sandoz (now Novartis). Large amounts of contaminated extinction water entered the Rhine and caused the death of large numbers of fish. The accident at the time was a reason for international alarm and plans to denounce the riverside people – and these are exactly the ones that were not carried out in the Oder, Maier said.
The BUND assumes, in its words, that there was “an illegal discharge of chemicals” into the Oder from the Polish side. “We can assume that there was a wave of pollution that flowed through the Oder.” In addition, there are factors such as the lack of water or the expansion works of the Oder, which would put the fish and the ecosystem under stress beforehand.
Maier criticized the fact that the expansion work on the Polish side was “controlled too slowly”. Even after the first reports of dead fish, the “core fault in Poland” was located. But not all went well on the German side in response to last week’s fish kills. More labs should have been included for analysis immediately, Maier said. “A long time has passed.”