A Day In The Life Of Mother Earth : Poland’s Vistula River : ‘In Warsaw, we are drinking diluted sewage from Katowice.’ Prof. Jan Dojlido, <i> Institute of Water Management</i>

The Problem--Water Pollution

* The U.N. View--”Fresh water is a finite resource and, in many parts of the world, is becoming increasingly scarce. . . . An estimated 80% of all diseases in developing countries and one-third of the deaths are related to contaminated water.”

* The Case Study: Poland--At least half of Poland’s river water is considered too polluted even for industrial use.

Imagine the pale dawn light of the pensioner--up early in the morning, as the aging often are, tugged easily from sleep by the days, all days now, when there is no work to do. Imagine Stanis law Skrzypek, 75, going fishing.

He is a tall, rangy man, with big hands and thinning, transparent hair. He looks from his apartment window to the sky, over the roofs of the surrounding buildings, and if the clouds do not threaten immediate rain, he gathers pole and bait and line, his jacket and cap and sets off across a dozen city blocks. He crosses the roaring highway and seats himself on the concrete bank. There he affixes worm fragment to hook and drops his line in the Vistula, queen of Polish rivers.

Below, on the dark surface of the water, a condom floats by. Other things, too.

Skrzypek is not alone on the river bank, but he is an educated man who went to university, even if he did spend his working life in a factory, and he cannot bring himself to join the fellowship of the toughs who gather in a loud group just upstream. Those guys are from Praga, across the river, and they are out here with the first light, fishing and drinking. Some of them take their fish back and sell them. Probably they never say where the fish came from.

The Praga guys, of course, have taken the best place for the fish, the spot where they come to feed . . . just below the sewage outlet.

Not that Skrzypek worries about eating the fish, which generally is leszcz-- a kind of bream. Mostly it’s OK, although now and then it smells . . . no, stinks.

“It’s OK to eat,” Skrzypek says. “If it wasn’t OK to eat, people wouldn’t fish.”

That’s not strictly true. Some fishermen come to the river only for the ritual, for the dropping of line into water, for the peace of flowing water, for the concentration on the discrete tasks of the process.

“It’s what you do if you are an old man,” Skrzypek says. “You come, you fish, you forget your ailments.” He fishes for three hours, he says. Goes home. Has breakfast. A nap. Then lunch with his wife. At 3 o’clock in the afternoon, he comes back again to the river.

But he is asked about the river. The question takes him back, six decades, to the early 1930s. An innocent time, comparatively speaking, for him, for Poland, for this long-suffering river where his cork dances on the line. A world war lay in wait then, and behind that, four decades of communism.

“I lived across the river then, and I can remember, when I was 15, going down to the river. There was a sand bar over there then,” and he raises his large freckled hand and points in the direction of willows overhanging the far bank. “And I remember I used to lie down on the sand and put my face in the water and drink. Straight from the river. . . . Now--well, the situation is worse and worse, isn’t it? You can see it. On this side of the river, you have the outlets where all the sewage comes into the river.”

The Vistula rises in southern Poland, below the foothills of the Tatra Mountains, and flows northeast, makes a long sweeping curve to the northwest, turns due north again and ends in the Baltic Sea just east of Gdansk.

For the first 60-odd miles of its 600-mile journey, it is a relatively clean river. But then it skirts the southern edge of Katowice, the most heavily industrialized and heavily populated region of Poland. Scattered through the surrounding country of Silesia are more than 60 coal mines. Down there, too, are 20 steel mills, and coking plants and mills processing lead and zinc, three oil refineries--the list could go on through some 5,000 industrial concerns.

The waste water from virtually all of these enterprises runs off into local creeks and streams, and those, in turn, feed into larger rivers, principally the Vistula and the Oder, both flowing, eventually, to the Baltic. According to the Polish Ministry of Environmental Protection, at least a quarter of the country’s large industrial concerns have no waste-water treatment programs or use inadequate methods and equipment.

It is the runoff from the coal mines whose impact is most immediate. Every day, 6,600 tons of chlorides and sulfates, the washed-away salts of the processed coal, are flushed into nearby streams, and then to the Vistula. And on to the Baltic.

Of all the pollution pouring into the Baltic, half comes from Poland, according to Adam Jacewicz, an engineer with Hydroproject, a Warsaw consulting firm.

“The deeper parts of the Baltic Sea are dead,” Jacewicz says. “Only the top is living. And the living part is becoming shallower and shallower.”

And from Silesia, too, come the phosphates and the heavy metals--lead, cadmium, mercury. Every day, the Vistula discharges into the Baltic an estimated 12,000 pounds of zinc, 165 pounds of cadmium, 1,650 pounds of copper and nearly 1,100 pounds of lead.

Bad as they are, these lethal contributions to the sea are but a part of the problem. The larger problem is organic pollution, nearly 470 tons per day.

The source of the organic pollution is agricultural runoff from fields fertilized with manure. And municipal sewage. Only 40% of Poland’s municipal sewage is given any treatment at all, and most of that is inadequate. By and large, Poland flushes its toilets into its rivers.

“In Warsaw,” says Prof. Jan Dojlido, head of the water chemistry and biology department of the Institute of Water Management, “we are drinking diluted sewage from Katowice. . . .”

And Warsaw is just as guilty. Three-quarters of the city’s 2 million population, the entire city on the Vistula’s west bank, have no waste treatment facility. A few miles upstream from the city, Warsaw’s contribution joins the river.

Dojlido, gray-haired, professorial, with a map of Poland’s rivers covering the wall behind his desk, turns and points with a pencil, tracing the river’s northern flow--through the cities of Plock, Torun, Bydgoszcz--finishing his thought:

” . . . and everyone north of us is drinking diluted sewage from Warsaw.”

One can well imagine why Robert Latawiec, manager of Warsaw’s central waterworks, exhibits a certain defensiveness over his operation, which is meant to make the Vistula’s waters fit for human consumption. Only 35 years old, elevated over a score of other waterworks managers to the top position, he is beset with hassles from the workers council (which wants him to fire all the former Communists on the staff) and the constant public nagging over the state of Warsaw’s water. He does his best to defend it.

What Latawiec has is, by modern standards, an almost ancient system of sand-bottomed underground filtration reservoirs, fed by three vast pipes carrying water from the Vistula. It was built by a Russian engineer in 1886 and has been in constant use since, even through World War II, and now supplies 50%-60% of Warsaw’s water.

As old as it is, the system, with its red-brick tower and its vaulted underground reservoirs, still does what it was designed to do. But it was not designed to remove heavy metals from the water nor to deal with purifying diluted sewage from millions of people.

“At the moment, because of the general economic crisis, the water has significantly improved in the last two years,” he says. He means that the forced closure of some industrial concerns has lessened the chemical pollution of the river. The organic pollution--the sewage from downstream--continues.

“But the water is not unsafe to drink,” Latawiec says. “A Dutch study of our water said the most important problem for Warsaw water is taste and smell, which is a problem of algae. They suggested a higher level of chlorine, which we thought just too high.” Normally, the central waterworks adds 1.5 to 3 milligrams of chlorine per liter of water.

How much chlorine is that?

“A lot, I tell you, a lot,” says Zofia Korczynska, one of the laboratory analysts at the waterworks. Along with her colleagues, she daily monitors the water being pumped in and out of the system. The Vistula water, she says, is full of e. coli and “other vicious bacteria we are not equipped to identify.” It is true, she says, that water going into the system from the waterworks has been biologically purified by the chlorine.

The waterworks sand-filtration system, they note, has no effect on heavy metals that might be in the water.

Still another problem--trihalomethane compounds, known as haloforms--is turning up when chlorine is mixed with water containing humic acid, which is present in a reservoir from which some northern areas of Warsaw draw water.

Not many residents of Warsaw know about haloforms, but they know the water smells funny, especially when it comes from the hot-water tap. Those with sensitive skin complain that the water irritates their faces. Mothers with allergic infants boil water for bathing their children or buy bottled water for the purpose.

Still others line up outside public wells, carrying plastic jugs that they lug back up to their apartments.

“It is really the fault of no one,” Dojlido says. “It is history. I don’t agree with those who say the Communists did this, to poison the people. No, it wasn’t that. If they built a factory, they may have had the money set aside to treat waste water. But the emphasis was always on production, and when they ran out of money, they spent from the money that was intended to be used for waste-water treatment.”

And still, money is everything. Water treatment facilities are needed for at least 1,000 municipalities in Poland. Even in Warsaw, Dojlido notes, there is “nothing started, no preparation, no plan. . . . Hospitals are being closed, and when you can’t keep hospitals open, how can you build waste-treatment plants?”

Jacewicz of Hydroproject estimates the cost of building three sewage-treatment plants for Warsaw at $5.25 billion.

The money, he says, will have to come, eventually, from somewhere. The stakes are too high. Perhaps Sweden or Denmark--the Baltic’s more prosperous neighbors--will realize their own interests can be served by helping Poland.

Stanislaw Skrzypek, fishless for the morning, has packed up his rod and his bait and has gone home from the river for his meal and his nap.

A few miles down the river, two young fishermen stand at the edge of a pond, once a slough of the river now sealed off and isolated from the Vistula, which flows past them about 30 yards away. The pond is so full of bream that they flop continuously on the surface. The two young men fish without bait, that’s how many fish there are here. “It wouldn’t be fair,” one of them says, “if you used bait.”

They have a bucketful of fish. Some they will feed to their dogs. Most they will throw back. These fish are not fit to eat.

Just behind them is a long, concrete jetty, wide as a two-lane highway, extending a third of the way across the Vistula. This is the main Warsaw outflow, the sewer line for about 1.5 million people. It is like the Grand Canyon of pollution--a staggering sight.

Over the river, a thousand gulls wheel and dive. The outflow comes at water level, so there is no cascade, just a steady rolling boil from below. Thousands of cigarette filter tips circle in the eddies, round and round, an image of endlessness and indestructibility. On the leeward side of the jetty, an oily black sludge clings to the dead water, seeming to climb at the roots of trees and rotting grass.

And so the river goes on, not quite dead yet, for all this poison and more to be added along the way. Ducks fly here, skim the water and disappear amid the willows. The river winds on, broad and silver in the distance, beyond the black still-water muck, toward Plock and Torun and Bydgoszcz, to Gdansk and the Baltic and the dead floor of the sea.