Hungary spill plant to restart as death toll hits nine

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - The alumina plant which flooded parts of Hungary with toxic sludge will restart production by Friday and will stay under state control for up to two years, Disaster Commissioner Gyorgy Bakondi said Wednesday.

The spill of industrial waste last week at the plant, owned by firm MAL Zrt, killed nine people, injured over 120 and polluted a tributary of the Danube. The National Disaster Unit said on its website the latest victim died in hospital on Wednesday of injuries sustained during the flood.

Bakondi told a news conference the plant would restart production Thursday or Friday.

"We gave a preliminary permission to reheat the power plant (serving the aluminium factory)," Bakondi told a news conference. "Letting it cool off too much would have caused damages worth billions of forints."

The firm will remain under state control for up to two years while there still is an emergency on the ground and during relief efforts, which would cost tens of billions of forints or tens of millions of dollars, he added.

"The law is clear on that," he said. "The firm can be under state control for a maximum of two years."

Prime Minister Viktor Orban visited the area around the plant. He has blamed "human negligence" for the spill, Hungary's worst ecological disaster.

NO FURTHER DETERIORATION

Latest checks showed no further deterioration in the damaged wall of the plant's giant reservoir, Gyorgyi Tottos, a spokeswoman for disaster crews on the scene, told Reuters.

Bakondi said the law requires those responsible for the disaster to pay for the cleanup.

Lajos Tolnay, MAL's chairman, said the company would cooperate with an inquiry into what caused the spill. He blamed natural causes, according to an advance copy of an interview with him in the weekly Figyelo to be published Thursday.

"The company must pay if it caused the damages itself," Tolnay was quoted as saying. "We feel that we are not responsible because our view is that fundamentally it was an unavoidable external force, that is, the development of natural conditions, that caused the catastrophe."

"My colleagues have done everything according to the rules," he added. He said MAL's third-party liability insurance was worth 20 million forints (64,500 pounds) -- a fraction of the likely total cost of the disaster.

Hungarian police secured the firm's premises Tuesday and took over MAL's information systems after parliament rushed through emergency legislation allowing the centre-right government to take control of the company and its assets.

Crews in the evacuated village of Kolontar, nearest to the failed reservoir, have nearly finished a 600-metre-long emergency dam crossing the village to protect the area from a potential second waste overflow.

Kolontar was evacuated Saturday after cracks appeared in the northern wall of the reservoir which could let out a further 500,000 cubic metres of caustic sludge if the wall fails again.

The Hungarian Academy of Science (HAS) said a survey of soil samples taken in Kolontar and the nearby town of Devecser on October 8 showed heavy metals in the red mud sank no deeper into the soil than 10 cm and posed no threat to water reserves.

It added however that further checks were needed to determine the full impact of the spill on the soil's ability to sustain life and whether it remained arable. Last Monday's spill affected over 1,000 hectares.

The HAS also said land samples taken in the vicinity of the failed dam showed high arsenic levels.

MAL's top executive, Zoltan Bakonyi, remained in police custody pending a court decision on his arrest due later on Wednesday, police said.

"The investigating authority's data thus far maximally support the decision to detain (Bakonyi) and the suspicions against him," police spokeswoman Monika Benyi told Reuters.

Bakonyi failed to prepare contingency measures for a reservoir wall failure scenario, police said Tuesday. Bakonyi had raised a complaint against being taken into custody and against the suspicions against him, police said.

(Reporting by Marton Dunai; Editing by Peter Graff)