200 barrels of hazardous chemicals buried by the army found in Šumava

In the area of the former military zone of Dobrá Voda in Šumava, near the village of Prášily, police and firefighters have cordoned off a site roughly the size of two football pitches, where they discovered 200 barrels of hazardous chemicals and around 1,000 tonnes of contaminated soil. Environment Minister Igor Červený (Motoristé party) called it an "ecological disaster" on Tuesday.

According to the Ministry of the Environment, laboratory tests confirmed the presence of dioxins and furans, mercury, arsenic, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, chloroform, carbon tetrachloride, chlorinated hydrocarbons, chlorobenzenes and petroleum hydrocarbons. The minister said these substances could have leaked into the soil and groundwater from rusted, buried barrels. Moreover, in the event of a fire, these substances could theoretically react and form a phosgene-based compound.

How the burial site was found

The site lies far from tourist trails and car parks — locals say only livestock wander there, and the abundance of mushrooms nearby suggests even mushroom pickers never venture that far. One of the workers involved in clearing the site said the barrels had been buried by a military garrison using a bulldozer back in Soviet-era times, and were discovered by chance — with a metal detector, when workers stumbled upon an old cellar. "Otherwise it would never have been found, and the forester would have gone on picking mushrooms there without a care," he noted. He added that unexploded ordnance and other hazardous military equipment also remain in the surrounding forest.

Tomáš Cajthaml, an expert from the Department of Environmental Sciences at the Faculty of Science, Charles University, said the find, while serious, is not unique: such substances are typical of former military sites, and chlorinated solvents were once widely used in engineering and dry cleaning.

Locals react calmly

Residents of the surrounding villages see no reason to panic. "I don't think anyone here is really bothered by it," says a young woman named Eliška from Hartmanice. Another local remarked wryly: "If you ask me, the real disaster is them" — referring to the politicians.

Josef Rada, mayor of Prášily, the municipality on whose territory the military zone lies, noted that remediation work had already been carried out three years ago — back then the national park and rescue services conducted a survey, but the matter then quietly faded away. "We all thought the problem had somehow been resolved, and now it turns out it wasn't fully dealt with. Either way, we welcome the fact that someone is finally removing from nature what doesn't belong there," he said.

A dispute over who's to blame

At a press conference, Minister Červený accused the previous ministry leadership under Christian Democrat Petr Hladík of knowing about the hazardous substances in the ground but failing to act. Hladík rejected the accusations, saying that, according to the latest information he had, remediation of the site had indeed been carried out.

The mayor of Prášily, however, is inclined to look for the root of the problem further back — in the army's actions four decades ago. "This is just my personal opinion, but I think the army, 40 years ago, didn't act quite as responsibly as it should have. They didn't always treat the land the way they should have," he believes.

Source: seznamzpravy.cz