Villafranco Del Guadalquivir, Spain --
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 Reys are at the Guadiamar River by daybreak. It would be an idyllic outing but for the carnage at our 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 Nantional 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 offical 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 throught the 50-yard breach in a collapsing reservoir wall, enough to fill more than 1,500 Olympic size 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 along at $10 million, spread mainly among 2,000 small farmers in one of Spains'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 on 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 of two."
More information about industrial pollution can be found at the Chemical Scorecard, a service of the Environmental Defense Fund. Find out what's messy in YOUR backyard.
