Heavy Pollution Traps Poland’s Industrial Heartland in an Ecological Nightmare

A yellow smog hangs over the sooty snow of Poland’s industrial heartland, carrying noxious dust and gases to the gaily painted apartment blocks that rise among the coal mines, steel plants and power stations.

“If you wash your windows on Monday, on Tuesday they’re dirty already, and on Wednesday you can’t even see through them,” a woman told a visitor.

The dirt this woman can wash away may be the least of her problems.

The Katowice region, also known as Silesia, is one of the most polluted areas in Europe, with concentrations of sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, lead and zinc that far exceed government standards.

According to a local report, there is enough lead in a double handful of ordinary backyard dirt to make a toy soldier, with minerals left over to paint him a uniform complete with shiny braid.

“We eat the bread, but we don’t know what’s in it,” said a mining engineer in the city of Katowice, the hub of an urban area of more than 3 million residents. “We find out from the press that the vegetables are not edible, but the average miner who grows carrots in his garden doesn’t see it.”

After decades of dedication to increased production, the authorities have become aware of the heavy cost of air, land and water pollution: Infant mortality and cancer and respiratory illness are all on the rise, the pine forests are dying and the ground is collapsing under towns that grew up over miles of tunnels.

The tunnels themselves can be the site of instant death--17 miners were reported killed Feb. 4 in a methane explosion 1,650 feet down in the Myslowice mine east of Katowice. The blast was not a rarity. Eighteen miners were killed at the Walbrzych mine in Silesia in 1985 and 18 were killed at another mine in the same area in 1982.

Despite the dangers, Polish officials feel they cannot slow the pace of coal mining and industrial production, for Poland is struggling to emerge from economic near-collapse. The Katowice region is only one of several where the natural environment is suffering from decades of neglect.

Stefan Jarzebski, the minister for protection of the environment, told the Sejm, or Parliament, last month that progress has been made. He said that the amount of industrial dust in the air has been stabilized and that some rivers have been cleaned up.

He acknowledged that severe problems remain, notably the emission of sulfur compounds into the atmosphere, the fouling of rivers by salty water discharged from coal mines and the lack of recycling plants for toxic wastes. And he said Poland needs to be better prepared for catastrophes such as the Chernobyl nuclear accident last April in the Soviet Union.

Despite these admissions, his report was criticized as “incomplete, insufficient and doubtful” by the Sejm’s Social-Economic Council, an advisory body. The council said the report gives the impression of wanting to calm people down and that it “totally ignores the existence of zones of ecological danger.”

Officials concede that there is little likelihood of solving the environmental problems of Silesia, known in Polish as Slask, until the 21st Century.

Until then, schoolchildren will continue to be bused out for two weeks of fresh air twice a year, and the population at large will have to live with the consequences of over-industrialization.

Among the people who are concerned are scientists, environmental activists and the newly appointed Roman Catholic bishop for the region, a worker’s son who grew up in a heavily polluted mining town.

“I survived, but others didn’t,” the bishop, Damian Zimon, says.

His intervention reflects the seriousness of the problem, for the church is careful about using its immense popularity in the secular world. But he said in an interview that he did not have to consider the problem for long before deciding to go public with his concerns.

“I know this problem from in here,” he said, pointing to his heart.

In a pastoral message last fall that came close to going beyond the line that separates church and state, Zimon put the government on notice that it will be held to account for the health of the population.

“We speak about the state of ecological catastrophe,” he said in the letter.

He cited studies showing that the province of Katowice, which covers 2% of Poland’s total area, receives 30% of all the toxic particles deposited on the country, 40% of the harmful gases and 60% of the industrial waste.

He spoke of a landscape formed of “dead waste heaps, some of them still smoking,” of forests “burned with the mist of sulfuric acid, poisoned with the dusts of the nearby zinc plants,” of “rivers that are nothing but open sewers,” of areas where the smog absorbs a third or more of the sun’s rays.

“My letter was a plea to save the environment from further degradation,” Zimon said during an interview in his offices behind the cathedral on a hill overlooking Katowice’s dingy, red-brick downtown area. “We have poisoned air, poisoned water and poisoned soil. People get sick more often, and they die earlier.”

Government officials do not deny the severity of the problem, but they say that a third or more of the pollution is brought by prevailing winds from Czechoslovakia, Austria and East Germany.

More important, Silesia is where the coal is. Coal must be sold abroad for hard currency and burned at home to make steel and other industrial materials, to supply electricity and to keep people warm.

Plans have been drawn up for modernizing the largely antiquated installations that make the area as polluted as it is, but “all this requires time,” government spokesman Jerzy Urban said. “It is not possible to shut down the whole of industry there, because the whole of Poland’s economy would come to a halt.”

Miners have been digging coal in Silesia since the 14th Century, but it became the Pittsburgh of what is now Poland roughly 100 years ago, when the region’s rich seams of black coal fueled the growth of Imperial Germany.

After economic stagnation in the two decades of Polish independence between the world wars, and the devastation of World War II, it was the Communist regime imposed by Josef Stalin in Moscow that used Silesian coal to build Poland into one of the world’s 12 most industrialized countries.

“Katowice was the locomotive of the Polish economy in the postwar period,” said Janusz Krajewski, the wicewojewod, or deputy governor, of Katowice province. “There was huge social and economic progress, but from the ecological point of view, there was nothing to be happy about.”

He is in charge of environmental protection, and this year he will receive 17% of the provincial budget. In the corridor to his office is a poster commemorating the 42nd anniversary of the liberation of Katowice from the Germans. Ironically, the poster features a dynamic sketch of the city with its factory chimneys proudly spewing smoke.

Down the hall is the Patriotic Movement for National Rebirth, known as PRON, its initials in Polish.

PRON was set up in 1982 when the regime headed by Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski undertook an effort, largely unsuccessful so far, to resolve social problems and thus regain the loyalty of millions of Poles who identified with Solidarity, the outlawed free labor union.

“We are trying to teach people to look after their immediate environment,” said Bozena Lux, vice chairman of PRON’s regional council. “If every working person fulfills his duties, we are capable of immediately reducing the degradation of the environment by 20%.”

But PRON officials are less confident about the tougher problem of finding money to revamp entire industries at a time when maximum production is needed to overcome a growing foreign debt.

Some steps have been taken to fight air pollution in Silesia, primarily the installation of filters to trap dust particles.

Moreover, local enterprises are required to make special payments to an environmental protection fund at a rate that is more than twice that paid elsewhere. There is a ban on construction of new factories, and any installation that will dirty the air is supposed to be balanced by the elimination of an equal amount of pollution elsewhere.

Fines have been linked to salary funds, Krajewski said, so that the sting of penalties imposed for violations will be felt from the front office to the factory floor. But reports in the Polish press suggest that the fines are too low to have much impact.

Krajewski said that some major polluters, including a zinc processing plant in the heart of Katowice, have been closed, “despite pressure from the industrial sector.”

As a result, toxic particle emissions are said to have been reduced last year by 200,000 metric tons. But it was clear from officials’ remarks that often the filters are not turned on, either to save power or because of negligence.

There are reports that cite 9,000 cases of children with damaged nervous systems, a rate of infant mortality 13% higher than the national average and 15% more cases of blood disease, 30% more cases of cancer and nearly 50% more cases of respiratory disease than elsewhere in the country. But Krajewski said: “Our examinations do not show major deviations from the norm. Maybe the human organisms that have lived here for generations have adapted themselves.”

‘People Live Here’

Indeed, an office worker complained that many children grow up with weak eyesight, spinal deformations and bad teeth, then pointed with pride to her own healthy family and said: “But you see, children are being born, people live here. This is where they came to work. Some may wear glasses and their teeth may be bad but, still, they grow up, they study, they are intelligent.”

Research on the problem has been going on for 15 years, according to Prof. Ladislaw Badura, chairman of the microbiology department at Slask University.

Badura sketched a factory and a forest with a ballpoint pen on the back of a piece of computer paper. He described how the tips of pine needles are designed to absorb moisture and how sodium dioxide from smokestacks combines with water to produce acid.

Poisoned by the acid, the needles fall, leaving pine stands made up of bare trunks topped by a tuft of new growth--more like a palm tree than a Christmas tree. The effect on animals is similar. They eat the leaves of plants nourished by acid rain and dusted with lead and zinc, all of which is absorbed by the bloodstream and transmitted to the liver and the brain.

“The same beautiful carrot can have enough chemicals to kill you,” he said. “It’s not a violent poison, but a long-term poison.”

To explain why Poland has not gotten around to solving its environmental problems, Badura said: “Let’s say a small farmer buys a cow. The cow produces milk, which the farmer sells to buy a plow. He will install a bathroom and a ventilator when the farm is more prosperous but not before.

“We are still at the point where the national product is not big enough to finance both the development of industry and ‘extras.’ ”