Baia Mare Index
Home

 

colour logo
  Site Under Perpetual Construction!

Home
Baia Mare Index

This page is maintained by: Dr Rick Leah, Nicholson Bldg, School of Biological Sciences
Any feed back or comment would be welcome. Please email
NB: The HTML has not yet been 'verified' - apologies to any disabled users - I will try to attend to this during this academic year
Original material is Copyright University of Liverpool, 2007
 

 

 

     The Cyanide Spill at Baia Mare, Romania

       (There is a formal summary of this incident on the Mineral Resources Forum Website of UNEP)

 
Baia Mare is a small town in the Carpathian Mountains in the north of Romania

There is a seam of gold in the hills, very close to Baia Mare - it has been mined for a very long time and since the resource is around seven kilometres long and up to 450 metres thick there has been a large amount of historic mining and the waste it has produced. For every tonne of rock quarried or mined from the mountain, only around 0.6g of gold can be extracted.

In the gold-extraction process, rock is ground to a fine powder, mixed with aqueous sodium cyanide to "leach" the gold out. Cyanide is an extremely toxic poison which kills rapidly as it interferes with the biological oxidative system. The processing plant is actually within the settlement of Baia Mare, and the waste the cyanide solution is carried by pipe to two above-ground storage lakes, between the villages of Sasar and Bozanta, 12 kilometres south-west of Baia Mare. It was the largest of these lakes (or tailings 'ponds' ) which suffered a structural, on the night of 30 January 2000, and poured 130,000 cubic metres of cyanide-tainted water into the Lupes, Somes, and eventually the Tisza and Danube rivers.

Spills from mine operations are never popular so it was no surprise that the cyanide spill was conspicuous by its general absence from Romanian press and media, which were at that time focusing on the country's EU aspirations instead. It is easy to see how the impact on neighbouring countries would be particularly unwelcome.

In Hungary, which was actually suffered most from the pollution from the Aurul gold mine, the media reacted with a mixture of shock and indignation. Under the headline "Poison in the water", the Hungarian daily Magyar Hirlap compared the cyanide leak to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and wrote of stunned Hungarians staring at the "dead river".

A flavour of the outrage at the time can be gleaned from various pages on the BBC News website :

10 Feb 00 | Europe
Cyanide spill wreaks havoc
11 Feb 00 | Media reports

Hungary's shock at cyanide disaster
14 Mar 00 | Europe

Hungary demands action over pollution
14 Feb 00 | Europe
Death of a river

       The political controversy continues with Baia Mare being used by Romania's neighbours as good reason to stop all future mining projects:

Hungary opposes Romanian gold mine project, says minister PDF
Saturday, 27 October 2007
Budapest, October 26 (MTI) - Hungary opposes the planned gold mine project in Romania's western Rosia Montana, Minister of the Environment Gabor Fodor told his Romanian counterpart Attila Korodi during a joint Hungarian-Romanian environmental committee meeting in Budapest on Friday. Fodor said Hungary had already experienced an environmental catastrophe on the river Tisza due to using cyanide leaching technology, which the current gold mine project also plans to use..... more
 
 

 

 

 

Page last Edited: 19/11/2007