Spanish Spill Sets Off ‘Chain of Toxicity’

As storks, egrets and herons swoop low over glassy wetlands stretching as far as the eye can see, Jose Antonio Ramos and his fishing buddy Pedro Reyes are at the Guadiamar River by daybreak. It would be an idyllic outing but for the carnage at their feet.

Wearing gas masks and yellow rubber gloves, the two men walk upstream along the muddy bank, gathering the carcasses of fish, crabs, frogs and eels still dying from a 9-day-old toxic spill that threatens Europe’s largest nature reserve.

Hours after the rupture of a mining company reservoir sent a wall of metal-tainted liquids into the river April 25, Spanish engineers built sand-and-dirt dikes to divert the flow around the 185,000-acre Donana National Park, a mecca for bird-watchers from around the world.

Now, hundreds of park workers and volunteers have been mobilized to a second line of defense here on the sanctuary’s outskirts. Their task is to scoop up dead creatures from the blackened river valley before the birds do.

The frantic effort has jolted Spain from what environmentalists call official laxity in dealing with threats to nature. As a belated, full-blown cleanup began Sunday, the ecological crisis was being described as the country’s worst because it could spell incalculable losses not only to farmland and human health but to thousands of species of migratory birds.

Nearly 7 million cubic yards of waste water rushed through a 50-yard breach in a collapsing reservoir wall, enough to fill more than 1,500 Olympic-size swimming pools. That made it one of the largest toxic spills from any mining reservoir in recent years.

Spanish government officials say a 7-ton layer of toxic mud now covers 9,000 acres of rural land, including rice paddies, cotton fields, olive orchards and cattle pastures. They estimate commercial losses this year alone at $10 million, spread mainly among 2,000 small farmers in one of Spain’s poorest regions.

“The polluted water has been more or less controlled, but now there is a natural channel of toxicity into the national park through the birds themselves,” said Alejandro Sanchez, director of the Spanish Ornithology Society.

“They are being attracted to the new mud with all its dead fish and frogs and crabs,” he explained. “Yet each one of these is a piece of poison. A chain of toxicity will build up in the park. It’s very likely that many species will be affected in the next week or two.”

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Working in pairs from dawn to dusk, the masked men of the marshes clear as much of the contaminated 25-mile stretch as they can each day. The area, just west of Seville in southwestern Spain, echoes with shotgun fire as the cleanup crews try to scare birds away from the poisoned fish.

So far, the workers have collected 20 tons of carcasses, but new ones turn up daily.

Ramos wields an aluminum butterfly net that has been stripped of its netting and part of its hoop so that it resembles a small pitchfork with one prong. Spiking each dead creature like a piece of trash, he lifts it into a black plastic garbage bag held by his companion--a grim ritual punctuated by grim jokes.

Every 15 minutes or so, when the bag is full, Reyes ties it shut, deposits it along the river road for pickup and tears a new one from a roll tucked in his rubber overalls. Most of the carcasses lie in a 15-foot strip along the bank, where the toxic flood is receding, but Ramos wades in occasionally to retrieve a fish floating belly up.

“Nothing lives long in that water,” grumbles Ramos, a 42-year-old forester and goatherd who wonders what good he’s doing. Tracks in the mud show that a heron has beaten him to this particular stretch and devoured most of a dead carp.

“I haven’t found a dead bird yet,” he says, “but that may be just a matter of time.”

In fact, environmental workers say they have picked up several dead birds and recovered 715 eggs from 23 nests abandoned along the poisoned riverbank. On Saturday, a cleanup worker found a coot stuck in fouled mud, laid him gently in an open garbage bag and stood on the river road begging a ride to any shelter that could save the bird.

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Toxins passed from fish to birds are not the only hazard. Unknown quantities of poison have filtered into the ground and might be seeping via subterranean streams into the park’s subsoil, environmentalists say. Meanwhile, the diversion of the polluted Guadiamar deprives the park’s delicate marshes, forests and sand dunes of their main water supply.

Also, specialists warn that an unchecked flow of toxins--lead, zinc, arsenic, cyanide and other heavy metals from the mine reservoir--could make its way from the soil into crops, contaminating the food chain and raising the risk of cancer and neurological diseases.

“The repercussions of this spill will last for eternity over thousands of hectares,” said Angel Martin Munico, president of Spain’s Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences.

The disaster came suddenly.

Boliden Ltd., the Canadian-Swedish company that owns the mine, has claimed that a “seismic shift” caused the reservoir wall’s sudden collapse, although a local geological institute said it recorded no earth movements. The company has agreed to pay for the cleanup and compensate farmers for their losses--a figure that may be determined in court.

Demonized along with the company, Spanish authorities have been criticized at every turn for their handling of the mess. Spanish newspapers question why toxic waste is stored so close to a nature preserve and why nothing was fixed after a fired Boliden engineer reported fissures and toxic leaks in the reservoir wall three years ago.

“Compared with the rest of Western Europe, Spain has been slow to industrialize and slow to value its environment,” said Juan Lopez, a Spanish agronomist who works for Greenpeace. “This reservoir was built in the late 1970s, when people’s political awareness was very low. Even today, Spain is not so crowded and has a lot of nice wilderness. Until this spill, there was no sense of alarm about losing any of it.”

For five days after the spill, the conservative federal government in Madrid and the Socialist regional authority in Seville quarreled over who was to blame and what to do about it. At one point, regional authorities refused to help when a makeshift federal dike set up to divert the poisoned Guadiamar into the larger Guadalquivir River and out to sea collapsed.

Under sharp public criticism, the two sides stopped feuding and launched a joint cleanup Sunday, sending 25 earthmovers and trucks to start clearing away contaminated mud. Less than a week after declaring the national park safe, Spanish Environment Minister Isabel Tocino was calling the spill “an ecological catastrophe of historic proportions.”

The problems seem endless. About 100 environmentalists in Sanlucar de Barrameda held a rally Sunday to protest plans to store some of the toxic mud in an exhausted Boliden mine there, maintaining that the place is too leaky. Other critics say the cleanup seems disorganized and doubt it will be finished before autumn rains spread the toxins.

As the sun rose higher along the Guadiamar River on Saturday, so did the stench from Pedro Reyes’ garbage bag and the irritation in his voice. Despite the gas mask, Reyes gets sick to his stomach carrying all those dead fish and contemplating their demise.

“Look, many kinds of animals kill other animals--but only for survival, not for the sake of harming them,” the 28-year-old rice farmer said. “Why are human beings the only species that carries out mass murders like this?”