Environmentalists Blame 2022 Oder River Disaster on Mining

Environmentalists Blame 2022 Oder River Disaster on Mining

Source: Associated Press

3/2/2023

Environmentalists Blame 2022 Oder River Disaster on Mining

Credit: Frank Hammerschmidt/dpa via AP

Greenpeace environmental group said Thursday that wastewater discharge from Poland’s coal mines was most likely responsible for the 2022 massive fish die-off in the Oder River.

Greenpeace Poland also warned that the situation may reoccur this year and also hit Poland's largest river, the Vistula, if the government and the coalmining industry don't take immediate steps to counter the problem. The fish die-out was blamed on deadly type of algae, Prymnesium parvum, that thrives in highly salty water and in hot temperatures.

The group presented results from their salinity levels tests in the Oder and Vistula Rivers that showed that the levels shot up, sometimes off the scale, after the rivers' waters travel through Poland's southern coalmining region of Silesia.

“Our hypothesis is that the source of the high salinity levels are most probably brine waters pumped from Upper Silesia into the Oder and the Vistula,” said the author of the tests and a Greenpeace expert, Leszek Pazderski of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun.