Tons of dead fish appear in the Oder River between Poland and Germany

German and Polish authorities have been contemplating for days how the Oder River, an emblematic waterway that divides Poland from Germany along 187 kilometers, has been filled with dead fish.

The two countries are still investigating the causes and are looking for the person responsible for the catastrophe.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has reported that the river's waters are possibly contaminated with mercury and other poisonous chemicals.

"Enormous amounts of chemical waste were dumped into the Oder river with full knowledge of the risks and consequences," Morawiecki wrote in a post on his official Facebook account.

“We are not going to drop the matter.

We will not rest until the culprits are severely punished."

Soldiers and firefighters remove dead fish from the Oder River near Slubice, western Poland, on Friday.

Lech Muszynski (EFE)

The presence of dead fish floating in the river triggered all the alerts in the Polish border city of Olawa, where the carcasses of other animals, such as beavers, were also found.

The head of the Polish national water authority, Przemyslaw Daca, has reported that the cleaning services had already removed 10 tons of dead fish from the river.

"This shows that we are dealing with a giant and scandalous ecological catastrophe," he told a news conference.

Meanwhile, Germany has complained that Poland failed to respect an international treaty by not immediately informing them of the river's contamination.

It was a ship captain who informed the German authorities about the dead fish on August 9.

The mayor of Schwedt (Germany), Annekathrin Hoppe, who this Saturday has started an operation to collect the remains of animals, has described the situation as an "environmental disaster of unprecedented proportions".

Hoppe has stated that she feared the effects on the Lower Oder Valley National Park would be so great that it would last for years.

"Tourism and the grazing and fishing industries will also be severely affected," she has said.

The Lower Oder Valley National Park near Schwedt was founded more than 25 years ago and is Germany's only floodplain national park.

The area on the German-Polish border is 50 kilometers long and covers an area of ​​more than 10,000 hectares.

It stretches along the western bank of the Oder, from Hohensaaten in the south to Staffelde in the north.

Waterfowl and other migratory birds use the area as a resting place.

The Ministry of the Environment of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (Germany) assumes that the mortality of fish in the Oder could affect the Szczecin lagoon and announced this Saturday that the contamination could reach the mouth, near Szczecin (Poland), already in the afternoon, depending on the conditions of the wind and the current, according to what the ministry has written in a statement.

In the course of Saturday, the pre-Pomeranian part of the Szczecin Lagoon could also be affected.

"We still cannot have an overview of the entire dimension," admitted the Ministry, which has asked riverside residents, as a precautionary measure, to refrain from fishing and extracting water from the river, regardless of its use.

The Polish police has offered this Saturday a reward of 210,000 euros to find the author of the contamination.

The German Minister for the Environment, Steffi Lemke, has gone a little further and has demanded a full investigation to determine the causes of what she called an "environmental disaster".

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