Posted on 01/09/2002 6:48:35 AM PST by tom paine 2
COPSA MICA, Romania -- The shepherds keeping watch over their flocks tell of the wonder in their fields. "Our sheep, once black, are now white again!" says Franti Teclas, who churns the milk from her family's herd to make a soft, white cheese.
For decades, two local factories, straining to meet communist production quotas, spewed out smoke that showered the Teclas family's sheep -- and nearly everything else in this Transylvanian hamlet -- with black soot and heavy metals. Now the sheep are as white as the snow, which also used to be black. The flowers are once again scarlet and yellow. The grass is green. And the houses in what used to be known as the "Black Village" turn out to be red and blue and brown.
Copsa Mica might appear to be a parable of post-communist redemption, of black sheep literally becoming white. But in reality, it now stands as an enduring testament to the toll that communist industrialization took on human health and the environment.
No matter how hard they scrub, the villagers of Copsa Mica can't wash away that poisonous legacy. When communism collapsed and the Iron Curtain finally parted in 1989, their village was exposed as one of the sickliest and dirtiest places in Europe. Shamed by shocking, other-worldly photos of the village and its soot-blackened residents, the post-communist government undertook a massive cleanup effort. But after several years of progress, that effort began to stall.
So stubborn and insidious are the pollutants that had coated the Black Village that experts now believe that the soil and the local food chain probably will remain contaminated for at least another three decades.
That's made it tough for Mrs. Teclas to sell her sheep's milk cheese. Nor is there much other local cheese on the market these days. "Before we can sell it at the market," she says, it "must be inspected by doctors to make sure it is edible."
The reason: the green grass her white sheep eat grows from soil still laden with particles of toxic metals such as lead, zinc and cadmium. Those particles end up in the sheep's milk and, thus, the cheese. "My advice is not to eat the white sheep, either," says Eugen Gurzau, director of the Environmental Health Center in the regional metropolis of Cluj.
"They also shouldn't eat the vegetables from their gardens," says Dorin Bardac, chairman of the medical school in nearby Sibiu. "And best not to drink the water," adds local health inspector Carmen Brezai.
The three physicians, who have been monitoring the failing health of Copsa Mica's 5,100 residents over the decades, are gathered in the mayor's office to confer with local leaders. Outside, a drizzle falls. "Acid rain," Dr. Gurzau says.
Though it has regained most of its color, much of the village's recovery is only skin deep. "It might look better, and you might produce a beautiful fresh red tomato from a garden in Copsa Mica. But inside and outside it's still poison," says Adrian Gheorghe, a Romanian expert on industrial risk management, who teaches in Bucharest and elsewhere in Europe. "Copsa Mica is a condemned place. I'm sorry."
After the fall of communism, Mr. Gheorghe tried to rally national and international aid for the village. The new Romanian government, eager to establish its sensitivity to health and safety concerns, closed one of the Copsa Mica factories, a carbon-black plant that had been the source of much of the soot. And it opened the other factory, a wheezing lead and zinc smelter, to the legion of international industrial-safety experts attracted by the huge cleanup challenge.
A team of consultants affiliated with the United Nations arrived with a modest bundle of money and plenty of advice. They upgraded some of the smelter's equipment, installing new filters, bringing in long-needed spare parts and setting up emissions monitors. But mainly they preached the urgency of establishing a health and safety culture, persuading local residents they would have to assume much of the responsibility for safeguarding their own health.
At the smelter, workers began changing into clean clothes after their shifts, so they wouldn't carry the dangerous dust home with them. And, when they wanted a smoke, they withdrew to special rooms where a nurse was on duty to ensure that they washed their hands before lighting up. In Copsa Mica, the lead-stained hands that held the cigarettes actually posed a greater health risk than the cigarettes themselves.
At home, residents took to boiling water before drinking it to fight water-borne diseases related to the smelter's long-neglected maintenance. Floors were constantly wiped with wet mops, rugs regularly beaten. Mothers exhorted their children not to play in the dirt. Toys were washed over and over again. Main Street got a new sign -- a metal billboard depicting dead trees, dark clouds and fish wearing gas masks and oxygen tanks as they jumped out of a polluted lake. The sign's message: "Remember, cleaning the environment depends on all of us."
The doctors monitoring the village's health noticed some quick improvements. The level of dangerous emissions from the smelter dropped. Lead concentrations in certain parts of the plant no longer exceeded allowable rates by hundreds of percentage points, but by teens. And they noted that severe cases of lead poisoning, with debilitating stomach pain, were steadily sinking from a yearly average of nearly 130 during the 1970s and 1980s. So, too, were lead-related afflictions of encephalitis and twitchy hands and lameness.
Environmental Safeguards
But, within a few years, the most obvious and cost-effective environmental safeguards had been implemented, and the pace of improvement began to slow. In 2000, with emissions of sulfur dioxide and metal particulates continuing to coat the landscape, there were still 77 cases of severe lead poisoning.
As it became apparent that the cost of a complete cleanup, if such a thing were even possible, would be incalculable, government's enthusiasm for the effort ebbed and other priorities began competing for its attention and its financial resources. "The town wasn't black anymore, so people focused on other problems, and Copsa Mica was forgotten," says Mr. Gheorghe.
By 1997, most of the outside experts had moved on, and the government targeted the smelter for privatization. Mytilineos Holdings, a Greek metals company, bought the plant, pledging to continue the cleanup. But four years later, the smelter still lacks some crucial emissions-control technology. In Athens, a spokesman for Mytilineos Holdings says the company has made "continuous investments" in the smelter, but didn't provide financial details. He said the smelter, called Sometra, was "in a dire financial, technological and environmental situation" when his company bought it.
Today, a sense of resignation pervades the village. Its residents still die an average of six years earlier than their countrymen. Their children's learning skills lag behind the national average. Their incidence of ricketts and asthma is higher than in the rest of Romania. Alcoholism and depression from the soot-filled days linger. Meanwhile, steady streams of workers from the smelter continue to trek to a mountain sanitarium to rid their bodies of lead.
"If you live in Copsa Mica long enough, all the organs of the body will at some stage be attacked," says Ioan Szekeli, who has lived here all his 47 years. He is convalescing at the sanitarium after having been laid low by the headaches, dizziness and stomach pain associated with lead poisoning.
For 12 years he worked at the carbon-black plant, where he lost his left arm in an accident and where his lungs, he says, filled with soot. For the past 17 years, he has worked at the smelter. "With the men, there's a lot of impotence from the lead," he whispers. "We all hoped things would get better after the revolution."
Instead, he and others say, in one sense things have gotten worse: With the cleanup efforts came massive unemployment. The closing of the carbon-black factory cost about 1,700 jobs. At the smelter, new technology introduced to control pollution also allowed the facility to trim its work force to about 1,600 from 4,000. Many of the laid-off workers protested the loss of their formerly filthy jobs.
"If you ask a resident of the city, 'What would you choose: a job in a very polluted environment or jobless in a clean environment?' most will take the first option," says Copsa Mica Mayor Coriolan Pop, who worked at the smelter for 26 years. He has been a patient at the sanitarium on five separate occasions. Now, he says, in addition to its poor health the village is just plain poor. Try telling people with no jobs and no income not to eat the vegetables in their garden, he says.
"People are still sick, and now they have no jobs," says Ion Todea, the 60-year-old curator of Copsa Mica's Orthodox church. For a quarter of a century he worked at the smelter, and he says he has endured de-leading treatments so many times he has lost count. "Of 600 families in the church," he says, "maybe 200 have jobs." On a good Sunday, he says, he retrieves the equivalent of $4 from the church collection box.
He looks up and sees a host of smokestacks towering over the church and the entire village. The two hulking factories sit side by side and stretch the length of town. Once the stalwarts of communism's planned economy, they now look like relics from the early days of the industrial revolution.
Weeds and grass push up through the soot still layering the area surrounding the carbon-black plant, which was shuttered for good in 1993. Tumbleweeds blow between the rusting parts that are gradually being sold off as scrap. With its broken windows and flaking paint, the smelter, which extracts valuable metals such as lead, zinc and cadmium from raw ore, doesn't look much better.
It wasn't always like this, the villagers say. When the two factories were built in the 1930s, and into the 1960s, they were outfitted with the most modern equipment. And for the workers, the pay was almost double the national blue-collar average.
"When I first came to Copsa Mica in 1965, it was as clean in the factory as in a pharmacy," says the village's mayor. "We were all young then, we knew there might be a risk from lead, but we got paid more. That was our choice."
Blacker and More Noxious
Under the brutal reign of Nicolae Ceausescu, Copsa Mica got blacker and more noxious by the day, as the nation's central planners grew increasingly obssessed with meeting the production quotas set out in their five-year plans. The dictator also barred the country from taking on more foreign debt. So, in Copsa Mica, smokestack filters weren't replaced when they wore out. When equipment broke down, it was cobbled back together and returned to action as fast as possible, no matter the cost to the environment.
The communist managers handed out soap, toothpaste and masks to the workers, and encouraged them to drink all the milk they could as a defense against lead. Doctors say that lead levels in the workplace at times were 1,000 times more than the maximum allowable under international standards. The number of cases of severe lead poisoning in Copsa Mica peaked at 210 in 1989, the year Ceausescu was ousted and executed.
"That's why we killed him," jokes Ioan Mercurean, a regional environmental inspector. He laughs, but feebly.
Today, Mr. Mercurean, Mayor Pop and the doctors monitoring Copsa Mica welcome the improvements made by Sometra's Greek owners, but they worry that it won't be enough. "Only 15% what needs to be done by this time has been done," says Mr. Mercurean, who is monitoring the smelter's progress. If it can't meet the emission goals set by the government by a 2003 deadline, he says, it could be closed.
In Copsa Mica, smelter officials refused a reporter's request to visit the plant. In a statement, Mytilineos Holdings, the plant's Greek owner, says it has repaid all of Sometra's debts as well as covering its pension funds, social security, health-care and unemployment benefits, which had been neglected. In addition, it said, "technological modernization and environmental upgrading" had begun. Without citing any specifics, it added that, "initial results are already evident," and "the aim is to make Sometra a world-class operation."
The huge scale of Copsa Mica's problems often overwhelm any progress. Sometra, which controls the village's water network, has built a new treatment plant to improve the quality of the local drinking water. Last summer, the decaying pipes that carried the treated water sprang a leak. Sewage from nearby waste pipes, also leaking, seeped into the water pipes. Dysentary and diarrhea spread through part of the village.
Up at the mountain sanitarium, Ioan Szekeli savors the fresh, clean water. "When I drink the water here, it is like I am in another world," he says. "And this air is very good." He takes as deep a breath as his ailing lungs will allow.
He is halfway through a 15-day treatment to eliminate lead from his body, after which he will return to Copsa Mica and his $120 a month job at the smelter. He has no choice, he says; a job is a job.
As he walks the vast sanitarium grounds, he meets a co-worker who has just arrived. Mr. Szekeli recommends the water. And the cheese.
One week later, feeling better, he is on his way back down the mountain, to the white sheep and the deceptively green grass of home.
Write to Roger Thurow at roger.thurow@wsj.com
I saw it just after the Wall came down, and was disgusted by the filth in both the air and water for miles around it.
It impressed me so much I wanted to buy plane tickets for liberals I knew, just so they could take it in and talk to the "glorious" workers that had to live in the Clintonian wonderland of these liberals "dreams."
I recall that a few years ago one of the biggest pollutors in Romania in the last decade was a US owned gold(?) mining company that built an artificial basin to hold the toxic exctraction chemicals out in the open. When the dam at one end burst, all related animals were killed for dozens of miles down stream. This was a case of the 'outside' taking advantage of lax saftey rules to maximise their profit, confident in the knowledge that the authorities were desperate for the $$$.
VRN
Another way of describing a system in which nobody has much or any personal ownership. Its the same reason the collective farms in the old Czechoslovakia left the tractors out to rust in the field all winter long, and left the hay unharvested after they made their quota.
They are referred to as "useful idiots" for a reason...
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