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.