Germany said Friday that the mass fish die-off in the Oder is a “man-made environmental disaster,” blaming the spread of poisonous algae caused by the arrival of salt into the waters.
Presenting a report on the crisis in which at least three hundred tonnes of dead fish were pulled from the river in Germany and Poland this summer, Germany’s Environment Ministry said the maximum maximum is likely to cause “a sudden build-up of salinity”.
The “introduced salt” has caused “a large bloom of brackish water algae that are poisonous to fish,” he said.
However, “due to the lack of available information, experts had to leave open the cause of the abnormally higher salt content,” he added.
German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke said it was transparent that “human activity” was to blame.
The Polish government had released a separate report on Thursday that also blamed poisonous algae for the fish’s deaths. More than 500 firefighters participated in Polish river cleanup efforts this summer.
But the Polish report said the crisis was likely caused by poor water quality due to maximum temperatures and very low water levels during the summer.
Poland and Germany have been at odds over the disaster.
Berlin first accused Warsaw of not talking about the problem, while Poland criticized Germany for spreading “fake news” about the discovery of herbicides and insecticides in water.
An article in the German magazine Der Spiegel on Friday accused the Polish government of failing to cooperate with its German counterparts in investigating the fish’s death.
The Polish government has been “increasingly reserved, in some cases almost reserved,” said Lilian Busse, head of the investigation.
Spiegel’s report said Greenpeace investigations had shown that high salt levels at a copper mine in the town of Glogow could have contributed to the disaster.
“It seems clear to me that the Polish government is covering up the reasons for the fish deaths in the Oder,” Ralph Lenkert, environmental policy spokesman for the far-left Die Linke party, told the magazine.
In August, Sascha Maier, head of water policy at the environmental organization BUND, told CBS News that it wasn’t just fish that were affected. Many animals, in addition to mussels and small vertebrates in and around the river, also suffered, Maier said.
The ecosystem was already under significant stress this summer, Maier told CBS News, thanks to excessive heat and little rainfall. These situations probably exacerbated the problem, at least because the decrease in water volume means a higher concentration of all the poisonous ingredients present. .
“Because of the lack of water, we have a hot Oder River,” he said. This can cause significant physical stress for many fish species, and “if contaminants are added later, they are less resilient. “
Anna Noryskiewicz contributed to this report.