2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill
The 2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill was a leak of cyanide near Baia Mare, Romania, into the Someș River by the gold mining company Aurul, a joint-venture of the Australian company Esmeralda Exploration and the Romanian government.
The polluted waters eventually reached the Tisza River and then the Danube, killing large numbers of fish in Hungary, Serbia, and Romania. The spill has been called the worst environmental disaster in Europe since the Chernobyl disaster.[1]
Aurul, the mine operator, is a joint venture company formed by the Australian company Esmeralda Exploration and the Romanian government. The company claimed it had the ability to clean up a by-product of gold mining, the toxic tailings, which began to be spread as toxic dust by the wind.[2] Promising to deal with them and to extract remaining gold from them via gold cyanidation, the company shipped its waste product to a dam near Bozânta Mare, Maramureș County.[2]
On the night of January 30, 2000, a dam holding contaminated waters burst and 100,000 cubic metres (3,500,000 cu ft) of cyanide-contaminated water (containing an estimated 100 metric tonnes[clarification needed ] of cyanide[3]) spilled over some farmland and then into the Someș river.[1][2]
