What else has to happen? Fish with a total weight of several hundred tons died in the Oder in the summer. The gills shredded by the toxin of a brackish water alga, which was able to multiply en masse because someone dumped saline sewage into the river. It doesn’t matter that the Oder and the creatures in it already had to struggle with low water and high temperatures.
Bad: It is still not clear who did it. Worse still, politicians seem to have no interest in finding out. It wouldn’t be very complicated. Satellite images from that time clearly show where the algal bloom started, one would only have to check which industrial sites are located at this point.
Scandalous: Large quantities of salt continue to be pumped into the maltreated Oder, otherwise the salt content would not continue to be high.
If this continues, the catastrophe will repeat itself
Measurements of the conductivity of the water made by scientists at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin show that the river is far too salty again. In Frankfurt, it regularly exceeds the 1,000 microsiemens mark, repeatedly even 2,000. Apparently nobody cares that these high values damage the river in the long term.
The situation is similar with the ecologically catastrophic and economically senseless expansion of the Oder on the Polish side. A court in Warsaw temporarily revoked the approval for this. So what? The expansion continues unchanged – then without permission.
Is that indifference, stupidity, or is it supposed to be some kind of endurance test: How much can the Oder endure before it dies? If Poland and Germany don’t get this under control, they won’t be any better than countries like Brazil, which Europeans like to point the finger at because they are ruthlessly clearing their rainforest.
One thing is clear: if this continues, the catastrophe will repeat itself and the Oder and its inhabitants will not survive. The toxic algae is already in the starting blocks. The salt it needs to reproduce and produce its toxin is already there, too. What is missing are higher temperatures. The next summer will surely come.