Ecological disaster in Hungary

An ecological disaster happened recently in Hungary(near Kolontár), after a dam that was holding big amounts of toxic sludge ruptured.

Here’s a panorama showing the ruptured dam, and the flooded area with red toxic sludge.

I’m concerned about what could happen with the surrounding areas, because the localities that were hit the hardest are anyway compromised and authorities are already evacuating the population. 5 have died. There’s also the danger of the sludge getting in the Danube.

The sludge is very dangerous because of its composition:

How does the sludge get produced and how could it escape?

When aluminium is extracted from bauxite via the so-called Bayer process, red sludge forms as a by-product. The sludge is normally kept in large reservoirs where its fluid and solid components separate into water and mud.

What caused the accident is yet unclear, but it is likely that heavy rain has caused the dam containing the reservoir to break.

It is also possible that the reservoir was just not large or strong enough to hold the sludge it was filled with.

What is the chemical composition of the sludge?

It contains mainly fluoride, sulphate and aluminate, but also chrome, nickel, manganese and heavy metals such as lead. Its arsenic concentration is at least a hundred times above the allowed threshold for drinking water.

How might contact with the toxic sludge affect human health?

The most dangerous thing about the stuff is that it is – to put it simply – a dilute solution of sodium hydroxide with an extremely alkaline pH value, between 11 and 12. This means it cauterizes eyes and skin, and attacks the lung when moist aerosols are inhaled.

Have similar chemical accidents happened in the past?

Ten years ago, large amounts of cyanide and heavy metals escaped from the waste reservoir of a Rumanian gold mine, contaminating rivers, including the Danube, and killing large quantities of fish. A similar disaster, also connected to ore processing, happened in 1998 in Spain when the waste reservoir at the Los Frailes mine ruptured and 5 million cubic meters of contaminated water rushed into the Guadiamar River near Seville.

Content from nature.com

I also heard about an accident in Romania with a man that fell  into a lake of this kind of caustic sludge. He was melted.

I can’t really find my words, but I imagine the situation of the people from those affected areas. I also feel bad for the nature…

The rural road is…

So cool! Besides having a couple of trillion dust particles, it also has bonus items: snakes!

Today I was walking on such a road and I had the “honor”(I guess, or the risk of not seeing it and then get bitten by a snake…) of encountering a snake. Well, it looked cool(I’m not really afraid of snakes or, generally speaking- dangerous animals, when I’m at a safe distance or they don’t surprise me.

Here’s the snake:

Of course, I’m not sure if this is “Natrix Tessellata”, but I have to thank a friend of mine, Andrei, for indicating me this name. At least it resembles very well with some photos of other natrix tessellata snakes I’ve found around the internet.

Wikipedia doesn’t state a lot about it, but I found out it’s not venomous. Anyway, I put my foot near it and it suddenly turned toward me making a “ssssstttt” noise.

But hey, what did I found about 100m away? That’s right, another snake!

This one was very small and inoffensive…

I was left with a small “wtf” sensation after this. It’s 23rd september, and it’s very odd to see snakes on the road I was(when all the summer I only spot snakes in obvious places).

The Squirrel

I was out in the nature in an unusually cold late-August day. I saw a squirrel in a nut tree and I decided to film it. Too bad I didn’t have a tripod . That’s why the quality is quite bad.

Massive Lightning

After so many days of hot weather, I predicted a great thunderstorm coming. Today there was one. There was a strange “windy” calm, that kind of calm that announces a very big storm coming up. So I went with the camera on my balcony to capture some footage, hoping to get a big lightning. I got one, it was very intense( shaky camera, I got scared , my pulse accelerated ).

Unfortunately, because the camera is filming at 25 FPS, the lightning just doesn’t look fair like in reality.

I hope one day I can film an intense lightning bolt with a 60 FPS camera… or who knows… if technology advances so that normal users can buy high fps cameras, I’ll film one at even higher FPS .

Anyway, here’s the footage, skip to 1:58 for the thunder .

A comparison between Atheism and Religion(mainly Christianity)

Link to the video on YouTube

A strong quote from the video :

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

-Edmund Burke

I agree with what the person who made this video said.  In my opinion, the downside of atheism is that they can sometimes do bad thing and accept them as a good thing. I don’t have a good example, but at least christian people( and I’m referring to the true believers, not those that just claim to be a christian and don’t actually practice their religion) have a tendency to stop themselves from doing bad things. Religion is targeted towards the good, to harmony. Atheism is usually targeted to accept basically anything as it doesn’t necessarily imply “evil” or “bad”. Take for example homosexuality! It’s a slap on the face of nature! Yet in Atheism it is considered as something very normal. And I myself am not bothered that it exists, but I hate the promotion of it.

That quote was a lesson for me today. I hope it will be for everybody who reads this…

Coming soon

Last Thursday( and the days before Thursday) I helped organizing the Fashion\Style\Karaoke( S-Star) Competition at my school, and also made photographs and filmed. Now it remains to compose this footage and photos to a presentable video.

That’s what I’m working on now. I’ll post it on my blog too when it’ll be finished.

Meanwhile, I hope I’ll be able to go for a walk in the nature, the weather starts to be more beautiful everyday here. If weather will be favorable, I’ll go with some friends in the forest after some snowdrops

A snowdrop