Seeing Red in Hungary

Red tire marks line the roads leading up to the extinct Somlo volcano, home to Hungary’s smallest wine region and only a few miles from the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history.

It has been almost two weeks since a concrete dam holding back millions of gallons of toxic sludge burst, sweeping two villages along with it and killing nine people. The fields are still red, eerily outlined in chalky white — the gypsum that emergency crews used to try to neutralize the caustic grime.

My father-in-law recently bought a small vineyard on Somlo. This fall is the first family harvest and my two children have been eager to try their feet at grape stomping. Thanks to the spill, they have gotten to learn about something else.

They have asked me whether it was a lava eruption; they have wanted to know if it was like the reactor accident I wrote about in one of my books. I’ve answered: “No, it’s not lava; yes, it burns; no, there is no radiation.”

My children were not the only ones who wanted to know more about the “red stuff.” What exactly is this sludge stored in reservoirs across this part of Hungary by the hundreds of millions of cubic feet?

My father-in-law told me that he knew about the dam; everybody in the region did. But there is a strange belief in the eternity of concrete in this part of the world — people built their homes a few hundred meters from the dam, while MAL, the company that owns it, was so sure of its durability that it did not have a protocol for responding to a breach.

Now everything is unknown. The affected villages sit in a Mars-red landscape. People are trying to clean up using their snow shovels, tools not typically brought out for a few more months. The sinister sound of the sludge sloshing around the edge of the shovel blade lingers in the ear, and makes the initial lack of reliable information more painful.

Soon after the spill, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences declared that the red sludge was nontoxic. The chief executive of MAL went on camera to say it was a completely harmless substance, that it could simply be washed away with water.

They were quickly proved wrong. The first responders suffered severe burns; apparently no one warned them that the sludge had a pH of 13, as caustic as lye.

The gap between the official statements and the reality of people dying seemed to widen the crack in the wall. For many, it brought to mind the time, thought long past, when so much of life in Hungary was defined by rumors and lies, when everything was a game of pretend and make-believe.

This time we faced an unknown danger, though it was posed by a substance we have been creating for decades — a byproduct of the manufacturing process that converts bauxite into alumina, for use in making aluminum. Fear became anger, and people demanded the truth.

The academy hastily took new samples. Ten days after the sludge began to flow we learned from them that it was indeed toxic, containing elevated levels of arsenic; when it dries, it will turn into poisonous dust.

That is not comforting news, but at least we now know how threatening the red mud really is. Though officials have yet to figure out exactly how to contain and clean up the spill, a new protective dam around the villages is ready, and we are told that many people will be able to return home soon.

Still, the disaster has made it clear that Hungary must reassess its environmental heritage, its decades-long practice of storing toxic industrial waste around the country. The next step is to find out exactly what is being stored, where and in what conditions. And we must find out how best to dispose of or contain the material.

This reassessment will have to be a political debate, involving more than just scientists. It must be about why we once accepted such threats to people and the environment, which means it must be about our past — a topic that many people in power try hard to avoid.

My father-in-law told me that his fellow winemakers have begun cleaning the tire marks from the roads around Somlo. The pollution never reached the water supply, he said. The wind blows from the north, away from the mountain, and the winemakers believe the harvest can be saved. But that is the only thing they are sure of.

Gyorgy Dragoman, the author of the novel White King.