Reporter: BARRY CASSIDY
The tantalising sound of a gypsy band music has attracted customers to the halaszcsarda restaurant for years.
It's the best known fish restaurant in the tourist town of Szeged on the bank of the Tisza. In the past, Hungarian tourists have come here just to experience the house specia;ity - a rich fish soup made entirely of local product. Put simply, this restaurant celebrates the Tizsa Eiver.
DEZSO FERENCZ(Restaurant manager):I think that only someone who was born along the banks of the Tizsa can really appreciate what it means. If I said that the people of Szeged and other parts of the country see the Tizsa as if it were flowing in front of their own houses then I wouldn't be going too far.
But these days, the waiters outnumber the customers. On this Thursday night - eleven staff looked after just nine diners. Ordinarily, it would have been booked out.
DEZSO FERENCZI: People have adopted this fear of cyanide poisoned fish in their way of thinking, and so I would say that they have stopped eating fish at all. We thought it would have some effect on business, but that it would be such an effect, we couldn't have imagined.
FISHERMAN: And neither could hundreds like him in restaurants, camping grounds and small stores all the way along the river.
Almost any day of the week you will see Mihaly (pron.: Mihy) Tarjani cruising the waters of the Tizsa river near his home - searching for a sign of life.
But of course, he finds nothing, and probably won't for years to come, because the river is dead -- killed by a torrent of Cyanide and heavy metals.
TARJANI:As we stood in the boat, we could feel it stinging our eyes and throats from a distance of a metre and a half
Even then, those who depended on the river for their livelihood, had no idea just how devastating this would prove to be.
But upstream in Romania, the mining company held respons ible, is still in denial.
PHILIP EVERS (Mine manager):There's a potential number of mechanisms for the fauna mortality. I think we really need to leave it up to the scientists to determine what the causes were. There may be more than one cause. We have to leave to up to them.
That lack of accountability annoyed the locals -- but what made them really angry was the television images relayed from thousands of kilometres away -- in Perth where company spokesmen put up extraordinary theories for what might have killed the fish.
COMPANY SPOKESMAN:You get dead fish where when rainfall happens and it can be due to solidity changes can be due to sediment in the water
Any culprit, it seemed, but Cyanide
PHILIP EVERS:At this stage, we don't see any conclusive evidence that it is Cyanide.
GABOR HORVARTH (Hungarian foreign affairs spokesman):This is definitely, I would say, one, if not the worst environmental catastrophes to hit Hungary. This river of some 300 kilometres length was devastated, wildlife, fish, any other creature in it exterminated, and it can be due with fear that some species which are globally internationally and in Europe are protected and rare creatures will be exterminated forever.
An economic as well as environmental disaster that began here - to the North - over the border in Romania, in the sprawling mining town of Baia Mare, and behind the gates of the Australian company, Esmeralda Explorations. The gold plant here is run as a joint venture with the Romanian Government. They use a cyanide solution to separate gold ore from rock. The method is entirely designed by the Australian partner. The cyanide waste is then piped six kilometres to a tailings dam outside the city. These days though, the only activity going on here is the restructuring of the dam wall. Antiquated equipment is being worked overtime to raise the whole of the wall by a metre. Gary Spice is one of five Australians based permanently at Baia Mare, and he was assigned to show us around.
REPORTER:Just explain what happened. How did it happen?
GARY SPICE:There was just too much snow and water, it just, it just got permeated with water and gave way. It started with a trickle and then cascaded, there was that much volume there. And was there a lot of snow in the days and weeks leading up to it
GARY SPICE:Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. More snow, the locals tell us than they've ever seen.
REPORTER: So what eventually made the wall give way?
GARY SPICE:The melting snow, I think, I don't know for sure, I'm no expert but it's there , too much water, too much snow, that's it.
But the company - facing years of litigation and possible bankruptcy - continues to dispute both the cause and effect
PHILIP EVERS:There's a lot of emotion. We really won't know until we get the results of these scientific investigations.
But you can understand why there's a lot of emotion, there's a lot of livelihoods lost along the riverbanks
PHILIP EVERS:Ah. I can't comment on that, but until we get scientific data, it's difficult to say how far it's got and we , whether there are any other influences on the fauna in the area
But well ahead of scientific reports, the locals are demanding a higher protective wall. This is not so much a tailings dam as a lake.
GABOR HORVARTH: Any contingency plan should be built upon the extreme of what can happen. From this angle I cannot and will never accept that it was rain, much, much rain which caused this accident. If there are standards, protection, technologies, that should be prepared for preventing and pre-empting any kind of extreme situation which might lead to or might cause environmental damage, this is totally and fully unacceptable.
Romania is the poorest country in Europe. Jobs - any jobs - are desperately sought. And even then. An unskilled worker will earn no more than forty dollars per week. To own a horse and a crude cart is beyond the capacity of most people here in Baia Mare. Little wonder that the deputy mayor Joszef Szanislo (pron. : Yousef Sanislo) was almost apologetic when defending the city's environmental standards.
JOSZEF SZANISLO: We've tried to find out what the people of Baia Mare see as their priority. So it's like this, above all our citizens want housing. In Baia Mare you can find a lot of available houses but there's not enough to go around.
It's against that background that Esmeralda has been accused of exploiting Romania's Poverty and its sub standard environmental laws.
GARY SPICE:I don't agree with that at all. The environmental laws here are very strict, they are based on the european laws. They are as tough as the environmental law in Australia.
You would never know it, walking the streets of Baia Mare. This display took place right outside Esmerelda's front gate. The people here learn to live with pollution, and choose housing based on the prevailing winds. All this troubles an emerging country like Hungary.
GABOR HORVARTH: Hungary is geographically situated in a basin situation which means that all of the countries which are around, east, north, west, are kind of sending their rivers and waters into Hungary. From Romania over the past decade something like 3 or 4 pollution hit the river system. They were far from being like this, to this extent, a catastrophe
MIHALY TARJANI: The last two or three spawnings were really successful. They were better than anything in the past 25 years. Lots of carp and pike, the really good fish, there were lots of fish of all types in the river.
Mihaly has been fishing these waters professionally for nine years This year was going to be his best. Imagine his horror when word spread that a deadly cocktail of cyanide and heavy metals was headed his way. When it did arrive, all he could do was join his colleagues and clear the river of tonnes of dead fish.
MIHALY:Of course, as we stood in the boat, we could feel it stinging our eyes and throats from a distance of a metre and a half. The health people said we shouldn't breathe it in for more than a couple of hours, but we couldn't stop what we were doing, and my eyes have been itching ever since.
These days, Mihaly feels restless and helpless. Fishing is his life - He has no other job prospects. All the money that he had was invested in the industry. Mihaly wants to give his family some hope. Constantly searching for alternatives.
MIHALY: There would be work, getting the river back on its feet can't be done without us. It has to be done, and something should be done as ..
MIHALY'S WIFE: We don't have a cent of income, only what we get for the kids - the family allowance and the child support. Five of us have to live from that.
REPORTER:And you have to pay everything from that?
WIFE: Of course, the telephone, what else is there? The electricity, the water rates - everything.
MIHALY:This has all hit us very unexpectedly. I don't really want to believe it. Cheers, this wine doesn't have the smell of cyanide
While the fishermen are destitute, those in the tourism industry are marginally better off.
Certainly they face reduced income but at least they can turn to more creative ways of doing business.
RESTAURANT MANAGER: At about 05.40 we'll reduce the emphasis on fish and sell less fish and taking this into account we create a different type of menu to put in front of our guests, with much less fish and mi=ore dishes made from other basic ingredients.
The very next day, Dezso (pron: Deshu) suffered the embarrassment of exactly that. He was chosen to prepare Szeged's customary dish at an annual get together of Hungary's mayors. For the first time Szeged did not offer fish from the Tizsa River. Everywhere you look, this city is finding new ways to cope. This fish farm on the outskirts of Town , is an exporter of freshwater fish - the second largest in Hungary. Now - twice a week - it sells directly to the locals - right at the farm itself - so that they know they are getting fish free of cyanide.
In the same spirit, the management tried to save some of the rare species of birds of the region.
GYORGY LODI (fisherman): at about 15.30: we offered the society for protected birds the smaller fish from the lakes and we placed them around the banks of the Tizsa and the birds and animaks ate those and so weren't affected by the cyanide poisoning.
Back on the cold, lifeless Tizsa river, Mihally has a more basic plan for the mine management.
MIHALY: First of all I would start by making him a good soup of fish poisoned by cyanide on the riverbank and making him eat it. If that didn't do the trick then I would have him tied by the neck to the back of the boat, and drag him through the water for three kilometres. That's my message to him.
GABOR HORVARTH : People, of course, are very angry. The conservative estimates say that life could or may be restored to the river in five or six years. Full restoration of the fragility and the pristine surroundings of this river will probably however, sadly, only come in a longer span in a decade or so. Yes, there is a lot of emotion surrounding this issue, and there ought to be. Thankfully, so far no lives have been lost. But a lot of lives have been ruined.
The tantalising sound of a gypsy band music has attracted customers to the halaszcsarda restaurant for years.
It's the best known fish restaurant in the tourist town of Szeged on the bank of the Tisza. In the past, Hungarian tourists have come here just to experience the house specia;ity - a rich fish soup made entirely of local product. Put simply, this restaurant celebrates the Tizsa Eiver.
DEZSO FERENCZ(Restaurant manager):I think that only someone who was born along the banks of the Tizsa can really appreciate what it means. If I said that the people of Szeged and other parts of the country see the Tizsa as if it were flowing in front of their own houses then I wouldn't be going too far.
But these days, the waiters outnumber the customers. On this Thursday night - eleven staff looked after just nine diners. Ordinarily, it would have been booked out.
DEZSO FERENCZI: People have adopted this fear of cyanide poisoned fish in their way of thinking, and so I would say that they have stopped eating fish at all. We thought it would have some effect on business, but that it would be such an effect, we couldn't have imagined.
FISHERMAN: And neither could hundreds like him in restaurants, camping grounds and small stores all the way along the river.
Almost any day of the week you will see Mihaly (pron.: Mihy) Tarjani cruising the waters of the Tizsa river near his home - searching for a sign of life.
But of course, he finds nothing, and probably won't for years to come, because the river is dead -- killed by a torrent of Cyanide and heavy metals.
TARJANI:As we stood in the boat, we could feel it stinging our eyes and throats from a distance of a metre and a half
Even then, those who depended on the river for their livelihood, had no idea just how devastating this would prove to be.
But upstream in Romania, the mining company held respons ible, is still in denial.
PHILIP EVERS (Mine manager):There's a potential number of mechanisms for the fauna mortality. I think we really need to leave it up to the scientists to determine what the causes were. There may be more than one cause. We have to leave to up to them.
That lack of accountability annoyed the locals -- but what made them really angry was the television images relayed from thousands of kilometres away -- in Perth where company spokesmen put up extraordinary theories for what might have killed the fish.
COMPANY SPOKESMAN:You get dead fish where when rainfall happens and it can be due to solidity changes can be due to sediment in the water
Any culprit, it seemed, but Cyanide
PHILIP EVERS:At this stage, we don't see any conclusive evidence that it is Cyanide.
GABOR HORVARTH (Hungarian foreign affairs spokesman):This is definitely, I would say, one, if not the worst environmental catastrophes to hit Hungary. This river of some 300 kilometres length was devastated, wildlife, fish, any other creature in it exterminated, and it can be due with fear that some species which are globally internationally and in Europe are protected and rare creatures will be exterminated forever.
An economic as well as environmental disaster that began here - to the North - over the border in Romania, in the sprawling mining town of Baia Mare, and behind the gates of the Australian company, Esmeralda Explorations. The gold plant here is run as a joint venture with the Romanian Government. They use a cyanide solution to separate gold ore from rock. The method is entirely designed by the Australian partner. The cyanide waste is then piped six kilometres to a tailings dam outside the city. These days though, the only activity going on here is the restructuring of the dam wall. Antiquated equipment is being worked overtime to raise the whole of the wall by a metre. Gary Spice is one of five Australians based permanently at Baia Mare, and he was assigned to show us around.
REPORTER:Just explain what happened. How did it happen?
GARY SPICE:There was just too much snow and water, it just, it just got permeated with water and gave way. It started with a trickle and then cascaded, there was that much volume there. And was there a lot of snow in the days and weeks leading up to it
GARY SPICE:Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. More snow, the locals tell us than they've ever seen.
REPORTER: So what eventually made the wall give way?
GARY SPICE:The melting snow, I think, I don't know for sure, I'm no expert but it's there , too much water, too much snow, that's it.
But the company - facing years of litigation and possible bankruptcy - continues to dispute both the cause and effect
PHILIP EVERS:There's a lot of emotion. We really won't know until we get the results of these scientific investigations.
But you can understand why there's a lot of emotion, there's a lot of livelihoods lost along the riverbanks
PHILIP EVERS:Ah. I can't comment on that, but until we get scientific data, it's difficult to say how far it's got and we , whether there are any other influences on the fauna in the area
But well ahead of scientific reports, the locals are demanding a higher protective wall. This is not so much a tailings dam as a lake.
GABOR HORVARTH: Any contingency plan should be built upon the extreme of what can happen. From this angle I cannot and will never accept that it was rain, much, much rain which caused this accident. If there are standards, protection, technologies, that should be prepared for preventing and pre-empting any kind of extreme situation which might lead to or might cause environmental damage, this is totally and fully unacceptable.
Romania is the poorest country in Europe. Jobs - any jobs - are desperately sought. And even then. An unskilled worker will earn no more than forty dollars per week. To own a horse and a crude cart is beyond the capacity of most people here in Baia Mare. Little wonder that the deputy mayor Joszef Szanislo (pron. : Yousef Sanislo) was almost apologetic when defending the city's environmental standards.
JOSZEF SZANISLO: We've tried to find out what the people of Baia Mare see as their priority. So it's like this, above all our citizens want housing. In Baia Mare you can find a lot of available houses but there's not enough to go around.
It's against that background that Esmeralda has been accused of exploiting Romania's Poverty and its sub standard environmental laws.
GARY SPICE:I don't agree with that at all. The environmental laws here are very strict, they are based on the european laws. They are as tough as the environmental law in Australia.
You would never know it, walking the streets of Baia Mare. This display took place right outside Esmerelda's front gate. The people here learn to live with pollution, and choose housing based on the prevailing winds. All this troubles an emerging country like Hungary.
GABOR HORVARTH: Hungary is geographically situated in a basin situation which means that all of the countries which are around, east, north, west, are kind of sending their rivers and waters into Hungary. From Romania over the past decade something like 3 or 4 pollution hit the river system. They were far from being like this, to this extent, a catastrophe
MIHALY TARJANI: The last two or three spawnings were really successful. They were better than anything in the past 25 years. Lots of carp and pike, the really good fish, there were lots of fish of all types in the river.
Mihaly has been fishing these waters professionally for nine years This year was going to be his best. Imagine his horror when word spread that a deadly cocktail of cyanide and heavy metals was headed his way. When it did arrive, all he could do was join his colleagues and clear the river of tonnes of dead fish.
MIHALY:Of course, as we stood in the boat, we could feel it stinging our eyes and throats from a distance of a metre and a half. The health people said we shouldn't breathe it in for more than a couple of hours, but we couldn't stop what we were doing, and my eyes have been itching ever since.
These days, Mihaly feels restless and helpless. Fishing is his life - He has no other job prospects. All the money that he had was invested in the industry. Mihaly wants to give his family some hope. Constantly searching for alternatives.
MIHALY: There would be work, getting the river back on its feet can't be done without us. It has to be done, and something should be done as ..
MIHALY'S WIFE: We don't have a cent of income, only what we get for the kids - the family allowance and the child support. Five of us have to live from that.
REPORTER:And you have to pay everything from that?
WIFE: Of course, the telephone, what else is there? The electricity, the water rates - everything.
MIHALY:This has all hit us very unexpectedly. I don't really want to believe it. Cheers, this wine doesn't have the smell of cyanide
While the fishermen are destitute, those in the tourism industry are marginally better off.
Certainly they face reduced income but at least they can turn to more creative ways of doing business.
RESTAURANT MANAGER: At about 05.40 we'll reduce the emphasis on fish and sell less fish and taking this into account we create a different type of menu to put in front of our guests, with much less fish and mi=ore dishes made from other basic ingredients.
The very next day, Dezso (pron: Deshu) suffered the embarrassment of exactly that. He was chosen to prepare Szeged's customary dish at an annual get together of Hungary's mayors. For the first time Szeged did not offer fish from the Tizsa River. Everywhere you look, this city is finding new ways to cope. This fish farm on the outskirts of Town , is an exporter of freshwater fish - the second largest in Hungary. Now - twice a week - it sells directly to the locals - right at the farm itself - so that they know they are getting fish free of cyanide.
In the same spirit, the management tried to save some of the rare species of birds of the region.
GYORGY LODI (fisherman): at about 15.30: we offered the society for protected birds the smaller fish from the lakes and we placed them around the banks of the Tizsa and the birds and animaks ate those and so weren't affected by the cyanide poisoning.
Back on the cold, lifeless Tizsa river, Mihally has a more basic plan for the mine management.
MIHALY: First of all I would start by making him a good soup of fish poisoned by cyanide on the riverbank and making him eat it. If that didn't do the trick then I would have him tied by the neck to the back of the boat, and drag him through the water for three kilometres. That's my message to him.
GABOR HORVARTH : People, of course, are very angry. The conservative estimates say that life could or may be restored to the river in five or six years. Full restoration of the fragility and the pristine surroundings of this river will probably however, sadly, only come in a longer span in a decade or so. Yes, there is a lot of emotion surrounding this issue, and there ought to be. Thankfully, so far no lives have been lost. But a lot of lives have been ruined.