Red Sludge: Not Good.

There has been an accident. An aluminum processing plant in Hungary had a spill of the toxic sludge by-product they get when they make alumina. The spill was (according to the radio news) bigger than the oil spill in the gulf from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. And it all came out in a few minutes. Four people are dead and three are missing. The missing might never be found (intact) because this stuff has a pH of 13. It was a river of red Drano.

So the Marcal river and the surrounding farmland is now completely dead. The sludge flowed down to the Raba, which is probably in the hurt locker for a while. Eventually it reached the Danube, which is huge, and seems to be not as-terrible by this point. They are pouring vinegar into the Raba/Danube intersection to try to cut the base a little bit, and so far "only" some dead fish are cropping up in the Danube.

Villages were evacuated. The villagers share the opinion of the Hungarian Prime Minister, who said they might as well not bother going back home. He also said they would have all died if this happened at night. Whole towns will stand empty now, farms dead for God-knows how long. There are inches of the stuff remaining on the ground and it has to be cleaned off, because it's high in heavy metal content in addition to being very basic. Huge cleanup round 1 fight!

The safety people say this could never happen in the USA. One Aluminum plant guy said their sludge was a little thicker than they store it in Hungary . . . there, you sink in it. Here, you could drive a car on it.

Nobody knows yet why this happened. If this were in the U.S., we'd already have a pronouncement that it was definitely NOT terrorism-related but we'll see.