After nine days, Nordic Waste, the company operating the site, gave up trying to control the landslide.
advertisementDanish authorities are working around the clock to stop a slow-moving landslide of contaminated soil from reaching nearby water sources.
Public officials and the company that operated the site are in a debate over who should pay for the extensive demolition.
The 75-metre-high pile of dirt is located at a Nordic waste reprocessing plant south of the town of Randers in northwestern Denmark.Contains approximately 3 million cubic meters of soil Contaminated Loaded with heavy metals and petroleum products, it is slowly moving toward the village of Orst, population 400.
The landslide was initially moving at speeds of up to 40 centimeters per hour towards a stream leading to the river. baltic sea It passed through Landersfjord, and the speed has since dropped to about 2 meters per day.
Beginning on December 10th, nine days later, Nordic Waste gave up on trying to bring the river under control, leaving the job to the city of Landers, who installed pipes to allow the river to pass safely through the site. I’ve changed my route.
Environment Minister Magnus Heunicke said on Friday that authorities were working on extending these pipes, with construction of sheet pile walls and some receptacles for contaminated water underway.
Heunicke said water from rain and snowmelt is the biggest problem. Last week, western Denmark received a lot of snow and rain.
“It’s about separating contaminated water from clean water,” he told a news conference, adding that the task was “very difficult.”
Is this a natural phenomenon or caused by human activity?
United Shipping and Trading Company (USTC), the company behind Nordic Waste, previously landslide With uncontrollable weather conditions.
“2023 was the wettest year in Denmark’s history, exposing the region to enormous amounts of rain. As a result, Denmark experienced natural disasters on a scale never seen before,” the report said. It happened,” he said.
On Monday, the Geological Survey’s report said: Denmark Greenland (GEUS) said the continuous accumulation of soil on top of Nordic Waste’s sloping clay pits was the main cause of the landslide.
GEUS said the landslide “cannot be considered a ‘rare and unavoidable natural phenomenon.'”
It is believed that it contains substances brought in from Norway. GEUS added that there have been landslides in the area since 2021.
Who pays for the cleaning costs?
It is still unclear who will pay for the cleanup. Nordic Waste was declared bankrupt earlier this week after the Danish Environmental Protection Agency ordered the company to provide more than 200 million kroner (17.7 million euros) in collateral to prevent an accident. environmental disaster.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen visited the site on Monday and said it was unfair that Danish taxpayers had to pay.
Nina Østergaard Boris, CEO of Nordic Waste, said remediation of the site could take five years and cost billions of kroner. She said the situation was “much more serious than anyone could have imagined, and the task of saving this region is far beyond what Nordic Waste or the USTC can handle.”
This case has started a debate about whether there is a moral responsibility to pay for Nordic waste. The government slammed Torben Østergaard Nielsen, Denmark’s sixth richest person after USTC, for failing to make payments.
“We want to do everything we can to make polluters pay,” Heunicke said.Research on who to be