WIDUCHOWA: As thousands of dead fish neared the banks of the Oder River in the village of Widuchowa in western Poland on Aug 11, local people realised an ecological disaster that started in late July in the country’s south-west was heading towards the Baltic Sea.

As Widuchowa’s residents searched for tools to remove the lifeless bodies from the the river, the government began crisis response that many scientists say came too late.

“It’s been the hardest five days of my life,” said Pawel Wrobel, the mayor of Widuchowa, which is around 400 kilometres (250 miles) from the town where dead fish had first been spotted. “I’d never imagined experiencing such a catastrophe, it is something you see in disaster movies.” With the help of the local community, he gathered dozens of pitchforks, used to lift potatoes, to remove dead fish from the river, which marks part of the Polish-German border.

“We don’t know how to do it and what tools to use, we learn from our mistakes,” Wrobel said.

On Aug 12, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki fired the head of Poland’s national water management authority and the head of the general environmental inspectorate, saying that their institutions should have reacted earlier.

Despite numerous tests of fish and water samples conducted by Polish and foreign laboratories, and a 1-million-zloty ($211,775) reward for information on the source of contamination, it is still unclear what poisoned the Oder, Poland’s second largest river.

Published in Dawn, August 21st, 2022