River highly contaminated after oil leak

A water sample from the Czech Bílina river revealed that the river’s waters are severely contaminated. After oily substances had leaked into the river from a nearby Unipetrol RPA plant on December 23, water samples from the river were sent to a laboratory. On Tuesday, the samples have been shown to contain a hundred to a thousand times higher levels of certain poisonous substances than is legally permissible for rivers, lakes and other bodies of water in the Czech Republic. A spokesman of the local water authority told journalists that those levels will have decreased by now, since the samples were taken a day after the leak.

Author: Sarah Borufka