4 Nations Try to Cope as River Spreads Spilled Chemicals : Rhine Suffers ‘Ecological Catastrophe’

Hilda Fedler, 64, who customarily feeds the graceful white swans on the bank of the Rhine River here, noticed a few days ago that some of the birds’ heads were drooping.

She had read in the newspapers that the river had been polluted by a chemical spill upriver at Basel, in Switzerland, and she called the director of the local zoo, Henrich Klein, to inquire about it.

“I went down to the river,” Klein, a burly man with a dark beard, recalled later, “and the birds looked sick. With the help of some soldiers in rubber boats, we rounded up four swans. We’ll keep them in quarantine in the zoo for the winter. I think it’s wonderful that this woman cared about them.”

The danger to the swans of Neuwied is just one aspect of the ecological disaster that has been visited on Europe’s busiest river by pollutants washed into it after an industrial fire at Basel on Nov. 1. French Environmental Minister Alain Carignon has called the accident “an ecological catastrophe.”

Hundreds of thousands of fish and eels have died or become infected by up to 40 tons of poisonous waste that drifted downstream along the German-French border, into the Rhineland and then through the Netherlands to the North Sea. Fishing has been banned the length of the river.

The four countries involved--Switzerland, West Germany, France and the Netherlands--have shut down all plants processing Rhine water for drinking. To stop the polluted water from seeping into estuaries, tributaries and underground water courses, authorities have closed sluices and locks.

Residents of many towns along the river, among them Unkel and Neuwied, upriver from Bonn, have been forced to abandon the river entirely as a source of water for household use. Water has been trucked in from elsewhere by local fire departments.

‘Just Like the War’

“It is just like the war,” a woman in Unkel said, “getting our water supplies in tins and bringing it home to drink and wash with.”

Another chimed in, “I feel totally dirty. I haven’t washed my hair for days.”

On Wednesday, the environmental ministers of Switzerland, West Germany, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, along with officials of the European Communities, met in the Swiss city of Zurich to consider how to cope with the widespread pollution and how to prevent a recurrence.

Throughout the Rhine basin, the Swiss have been roundly criticized for their delay in notifying agencies downriver promptly after the catastrophic spill occurred on Nov. 1. Some delegates raised questions about whether the Swiss chemical plants have taken adequate safeguards.

Compensation by Swiss

After some hours of discussion, Swiss President Alphons Egli agreed to consider paying compensation to users of Rhine water and promised to tighten regulations governing the handling of harmful chemicals. He said he hopes all claims can be settled without legal action, according to the spokesman for the West German delegation.

Some Germans are referring to the incident as “Chernobale”--a play on the words “Bale,” as Basel is called in French, and Chernobyl, site of last spring’s nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union.

Willy Brandt, the former German chancellor, who makes his home in Unkel, called it “Bhopal on the Rhine,” referring to the deadly gas leak two years ago in India.

West German authorities are calling it simply the worst example of Rhine pollution in a decade. An official of a fishermen’s group has gone further and called it “the worst disaster ever to hit the upper Rhine.” He said fishermen are finding pike, perch, trout and carp, as well as eel, dead as a result of the spill.

“We have to expect that fish and small marine organisms in wide stretches of the upper Rhine between Basel and Karlsruhe will be destroyed,” he said.

Pollutants Reach Sea

By late Wednesday, most of the poisonous material had passed out of the river and into the North Sea. Some experts think it will soon be dispersed in the sea, but others dispute that view. The Dutch minister of public works, Neelie Smit-Kroes, said the pollutants represent “a terrible setback in the struggle to make the North Sea cleaner.”

For centuries, the Rhine has been a working river. Thousands of boats and barges move constantly up and down, carrying coal, oil, grain, ore, sand, chemicals and other cargo between Rotterdam at the river’s mouth and cities along its length--Duisburg, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Bonn, Coblenz, Mainz, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Basel and Constance.

The river is 820 miles in length, and it is the source of fish and other seafood, as well as drinking water, for those who live along it. Among its major tributaries are the Neckar, Main, Mosel, Ahr, Ruhr.

It rises in the Alps, in central eastern Switzerland, and flows first to the east and then north, along the border with Liechtenstein and Austria. It flows into Lake Constance and then out again, moving west along the Swiss-German frontier to Basel, where it takes a hard right to the north, forming the border between France and West Germany.

Myth and Legend

At Mainz the Rhine picks up the Main, then enters the Rhine Valley gorge of German myth and legend, passing castles and the Lorelei, where Siegfried slew the dragon.

Victor Hugo once observed, with a touch of French hyperbole: “The Rhine is swift as the Rhone, wide as the Loire, deeply embanked like the Meuse, winding as the Seine, limpid and green as the Somme, historic as the Tiber, royal as the Danube, mysterious as the Nile, spangled with golds like a river of America, covered with fables and phantoms like a river of Asia.”

The spill took place at a warehouse of the Sandoz chemical company at Schweizerhalle, just outside Basel. Fire broke out at the warehouse, and water poured on the flames flushed tons of agricultural chemicals and solvents, along with a quantity of mercury, directly into the river. The warehouse had no heat sensors, no automatic sprinklers and no provision for drainage.

At first the principal fear was that the air might be polluted--a repetition of a 1976 incident involving another Swiss chemical firm, Hoffmann-La Roche, which poisoned the atmosphere around Seveso in northern Italy. But it soon became clear that the main danger was to the Rhine.

Tons of Dead Fish

Walter Herrmann, chief inspector of the Rhine River police in Basel, told of finding tons of dead fish and eels in the river.

“The whole ecosystem is destroyed due to this accident,” he said.

West German officials said that as much mercury was dumped into the river in one day as there would normally be in an entire year.

Since the Sandoz incident, it has been disclosed that Ciba-Geigy, a chemical company close by, accidentally spilled about 90 gallons of the herbicide atrazine into the Rhine the day before. Ciba-Geigy officials insist that the herbicide would cause no harm to marine life.

Even before the spill, there were profound concerns about the Rhine’s pollution and efforts were under way to clean it up. Dutch scientists, for example, had sounded a warning that the “high frequency of liver cancer observed in flounder and dab in Dutch coastal waters is cause for major concern.”

Delay in Notification

What has angered many German, French and Dutch officials is that the Swiss waited for two days before notifying authorities downriver of the spill in Basel.

The Swiss, by calling the meeting of ministers at Zurich, and by agreeing to consider paying compensation, appeared to be admitting that they had erred.

The newspaper Baseler Zeitung said in an editorial: “The Swiss used to be considered clean, their industry safe, and that included the chemical industry. That is all past now.”

French and Dutch authorities said they were able to minimize damage from the pollution by closing the gates and locks of the canals and tributaries that flow into the Rhine. The situation in the Dutch lowlands was relieved to some extent by the tributaries that feed into the Rhine and dilute the spillage.

Bruno Voskuil of the Dutch Environment Ministry said the spill had been diluted to the extent that in Holland it will probably kill only microorganisms, not fish.

‘Sewer of Europe’

But Smit-Kroes, the minister of public works, said that as a result of the spill the river’s “ecological system has taken an unbelievable beating.” She referred to the Rhine as the “sewer of Europe.”

Smit-Kroes, saying she was angry at Swiss delays in passing on word of the spill, announced she would seek financial compensation from either the Swiss government or the Sandoz company.

Sandoz has made no public comment on claims for compensation but has rejected charges that it violated regulations on the storage of dangerous materials at its Basel warehouse.

In Basel, Sandoz executives called a public meeting on Monday to discuss the accident but were forced to flee from the conference room to escape angry crowds protesting the spill. The day before, more than 10,000 demonstrators had marched through Basel to protest the accident, shouting such slogans as “We don’t want to be tomorrow’s fish!”

A Sandoz spokesman, Marc Sieber, denied suggestions that the company had been careless about the way it stored dangerous chemicals such as insecticides, dyes and mercury. He said government authorities approved the company’s conversion of an old machinery storeroom into a chemical warehouse in 1979.

Denies Getting Warning

The Greens, the West German environmental party, has charged that a Swiss insurance company warned Sandoz management five years ago of safety lapses at the plant. But a company spokesman dismissed that suggestion in an interview with the Neuchatel newspaper Feuille d’Avis.

On the Zurich stock exchange, the value of Sandoz’ shares fell Monday by about 10%, apparently because investors expect the company to be hit with big liability suits.

The pollution is dispiriting to officials who have been campaigning for a cleaner Rhine. Before the spill, their efforts had been rewarded by the reappearance of fish in the waterway, and by improvement in the quality of the water to the point that it could again be used in households.

Companies all along the Rhine have been involved in a program to install filtration plants and end the dumping of harmful chemicals into the river.

Evaluating Danger

Now all the West German water authorities have cut off their supplies from the Rhine, but most said they plan to reopen the taps if it can be established that the danger is past.

Manfred Lindner, an official with the Rhine water authority of West Germany, said there is a danger that the pollutants may find their way into wells. Mayor Herman Ilaender of Neuwied said that all the wells in the community have been closed.

“We are asking people to be very economical about using water,” he said. “What I am really angry about is the lack of information we had. By the time I was informed about the pollution, it had already reached us.”

MP, Neuwied, DON CLEMENT / Los Angeles Times