Poland’s Vistula River polluted after sewage plant failure  

Officials have warned of a looming environmental catastrophe after raw sewage was pumped into Poland’s largest river, the Vistula, following a malfunction in a Warsaw treatment plant.

Raw sewage flowing into the Vistula River on Thursday.

Photo: PAP/Leszek Szymański

Thousands of tonnes of untreated sewage have been dumped directly into the river since the system broke down late on Tuesday, according to reports.

Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski sought to allay concerns, but some officials issued warnings of an impending environmental disaster and said the breakdown posed a health risk.

Chief Environmental Protection Inspector Paweł Ciećko on Thursday warned that the Vistula River’s ecosystem could be destroyed beyond repair if the malfunction took a long time to fix.

Environment Minister Henryk Kowalczyk told a news conference that the concentration of ammonium nitrate in the water at the site where sewage was being dumped in the river was 43 times higher than before the emergency discharge began.

The Vistula River bisects the Polish capital and empties into the Baltic Sea in the country’s north.

Sewage was being diverted into the river as an emergency measure designed to prevent the city from being flooded by a blocked-up sewer system.

Warsaw's Trzaskowski on Wednesday convened an urgent meeting of a crisis management team in response to the emergency.

He told reporters at a news conference that the city’s water and sewage company had decided to “conduct a controlled discharge of sewage” from the part of Warsaw on the west bank of the Vistula River.

He said the decision had been made “as a result of a collector system failure” at the Czajka sewage treatment plant on the river’s east bank.

The Czajka sewage treatment plant in Warsaw. Photo: Panek [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Trzaskowski insisted that the emergency discharge of sewage posed no threat to drinking water in Warsaw.

But officials including Health Minister Łukasz Szumowski on Thursday warned residents in areas north of Warsaw, including the city of Płock some 110 kilometres downstream, not to go swimming or fishing in the Vistula River.

A crisis management meeting was scheduled to be held at Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s office in the Polish capital in the evening.

Sewage was being discharged into the river at a rate of 3,000 litres per second, according to officials.

Work was under way to make the Warsaw treatment plant operational again.

The Vistula River flowing through Warsaw. Photo: Dariusz Kowalczyk [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

(gs/pk)

Source: IAR, PAP, TVP Info