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com: NATO Bombs Left a Toxic Slough

NATO Bombs Left a Toxic Slough

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 21, 1999; Page A15

On This Site PANCEVO, Yugoslavia, July 20—

Balkans Special The largest petrochemical complex in
Report the Balkans now feels like a post-
industrial ghost town, scarred by
Workers repair a destroyed oil refinery unit at
hellish fires and choked with twisted the Pancevo fertilizer factory Tuesday. The
debris. No one works here, except the factory was hit by NATO missiles on April 18.
(Ivan Milutinovic — Reuters)
U.N. inspectors who arrived today,
and they are very careful where they step.

Just as the scorched and looted landscape of Kosovo is a legacy of

the late war, so too are the oil refinery, fertilizer plant and
petrochemical complex of Pancevo, which were heavily and
repeatedly bombed by NATO warplanes.

From their ruptured storage tanks, they bleed a toxic witch's brew of
ammonia, crude oil, liquid chlorine, hydrochloric acid, mercury and
vinyl chloride monomers--a component of industrial plastics.

The chemicals, some of them highly carcinogenic, burned out of

control for days, drifting through the city of 130,000 in clouds of
white mist and black smoke, spreading across the landscape and
drooling into the canals and rivers that feed the Danube River.
Officials reported "black rain" falling in nearby regions.

Teams of technicians and inspectors from the U.N. environmental

agency and from FOCUS, a similar group composed of Swiss,
Russian, Austrian and Greek members, entered the complex today to
scratch in the dirt and dip vials into canals to see what the NATO
bombardment wrought. The samples are being sent to laboratories
around the world, and recommendations and reports will be issued
soon.

Roland Wiederkehr, a member of the Swiss parliament and of

FOCUS, said he saw droplets of mercury spattered around the site,
while the transport canals beside one of the plants were filled with
crude oil. "It was just amazing to see," Wiederkehr said.

The environmental damage at the site will take months, and perhaps
years, to assess--along with its potential threat to human health.
Moreover, it will be difficult to determine specific effects of the
bombings here, since Pancevo has had problems with lower-level
pollution for years.

The city itself--about 10 miles from Belgrade on the north side of the
Danube--was spared a good measure of the airborne fallout from the

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13.7.2017. Washingtonpost.com: NATO Bombs Left a Toxic Slough

airstrikes, because prevailing winds blew most of the smoke to the

west.

But in the days after the initial bombings, government officials

suggested that pregnant women leave the city, and some physicians
have since suggested that women early in their pregnancies seek
abortions.

Before dawn on April 18, NATO bombs hit a storage tank containing
vinyl chloride monomers (VCM)--a notorious carcinogen--which
burned and produced a white fog that spread across Pancevo.

Around sunrise, the Pancevo Institute for Health Protection recorded

concentrations of VCM moving through the town that were 10,600
times more than safe industrial levels.

Pancevo Mayor Srdjan Mikovic recalled how the cloud rolled across
the city and how people ran into the streets, some wearing masks, to
watch it pass. Mikovic said it seemed like something out of a horror
movie. "We made a videotape," he said. "You can see the gas floating
through our town."

On June 5, Mikovic sent an urgent appeal to humanitarian and

environmental groups around the world, warning them of the cost of
bombing the city's petrochemical plants. "Pancevo has become a
ghost city covered with black clouds on the sky and mixed poisons,
which rolled through the streets trying to find its victims," he wrote
in an e-mail that day. "The surroundings of Pancevo turned into a
huge refugee camp"--a reference to the tens of thousands of people
who fled the city because of the smoke.

Mikovic appealed to NATO to stop bombing the chemical facilities.

"I am sorry that when I began to warn authorities here and in Europe
how dangerous it was to bomb Pancevo that nobody paid any
attention," he said.

At his office today, Mikovic offered his guests postcards of Pancevo

that showed burning refineries and black smoke floating over the
city. "I am sorry I cannot be more merry," he said. "But look at
these."

During the war, NATO spokesmen described the plants as legitimate

military targets, and few allied officials seemed to consider the
possible environmental hazards of bombing the petrochemical and
fertilizer facilities.

The complex was built in consultation with engineers from the

United States and Europe, and Mikovic said NATO airstrike planners
should have known what was in the storage tanks.

Simon Bancov, Belgrade's inspector for the protection of the human

environment, has warned against eating vegetables produced in the
immediate area of Pancevo. He also has issued a temporary ban on
fishing in the nearby Danube because of the potentially large
quantities of toxic chemicals that continue to seep into the river--
already one of the most polluted in Europe.

Mikovic said he does not want to sound too sensational about the
environmental and health impacts of the bombing. He welcomed the
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13.7.2017. Washingtonpost.com: NATO Bombs Left a Toxic Slough

U.N. and FOCUS groups to do their testing and write their reports.
"Then the world will know what is the truth," he said.

© 1999 The Washington Post Company

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