Vsetín – The District Court in Vsetín today, while discussing the case of poisoning of the river Bečva, played a video recording of an attempt made by the police together with expert Jiří Klicpera a few months after the accident. An expert poured dye into the water at the Energoaqua outlet and watched as it mixed with the water in the river. In the video, Klicpera said that after an hour from the start of the experiment and 1200 meters from the outlet, the dye can be seen mixing into the entire flow. It is a place under the Juřinka 2 weir. Moments before, a police technician said in the recording that there is a green coloration across the width of the river.
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Photo gallery: Death of fish and leakage of substances into the Bečva River
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However, the fishermen stated in court today that they only observed the first dead fish near the Choryňské bridge, i.e. about 3.5 kilometers downstream from the outlet of the Energoaqua company, which is being sued for the ecological accident on September 20, 2020, together with the company's director, Oldřich Havelka. “I consider it a very important piece of evidence that showed from the very beginning that the investigation was not going in the right direction,” said Havelka, who, like the company's representative, Vladimír Kurka, rejected the blame.
According to Havelk's defense attorney Jiří Obluk, the video is in brutal contradiction to what Klicpera stated in the written version of the expert report. According to him, the expert wrote that the complete mixing of the dye with water took place up to 3.4 kilometers from the outlet of the Energoaqua company. Prosecutor Jiří Sachr does not consider the statements of the technician and the expert in the video to be decisive due to their position. He pointed to photos from drones, which he says prove that just before the Juřinka 2 weir, waste water and surface water did not mix, and the color even under the weir remained on the right bank of the river.
According to the fishermen, fish jumped out of the water when poisoned, others spun around their own axis or swam upside down. Some of the fishermen could also smell the smell of chlorine from the water, others did not. “The fish shot like suicides at the stones on the shore. In all directions. They ran away from what was flowing there. We smelled something like Savo,” said fisherman Jiří Kašpar. He stated that together with his son and a volunteer fireman, he collected water samples in three rinsed PET bottles, which he then handed over to Eliška Trčková from the environmental department of the Municipal Office in Hranice in Přerovsk.
The court also summoned Trčková to testify today. She confirmed that she had received two PET bottles with water samples from the fishermen. “We agreed with the representative of the Czech Environmental Inspection that they were inconclusive, we didn't know where they came from, we got new, high-quality ones,” Trčková said. According to her, they poured out the water from the fishermen.
Many live fish were observed by fishermen after poisoning at the footbridge in Lhotka nad Bečvou in the Vsetín region. It is located about 1.5 kilometers downstream below the outlet of the Energoaqua company, where, according to the indictment, poisonous substances got into the water, and about two kilometers above the bridge near Choryně in Vsetínsk.
Witness Lukáš Gerla testified that he saw the first dead fish on the day of the poisoning about 100 meters below the last outlet in Lhotka nad Bečvou, which is located on the right bank of the Bečva near the former piggery. He believes that the poisonous substances got into the river right here, which is what he said to the responding firefighters and police. “No one went there, no one dealt with it. It couldn't have been another canal. That canal was whitewashed, burned. No one knows where it leads,” said Gerla. According to him, moss and algae were growing on other higher outlets.
Like other fishermen, he claimed in court that some of the caught fish had been corroded. However, other fishermen did not notice anything special about them. Some fishermen also complained that their hands burned after being immersed in the water. According to fishermen, the river had a low flow at the time of the poisoning due to the drought, but the water in it was clean. The main trial should continue on Wednesday, February 22.
For damaging and endangering the environment and unauthorized handling of protected wild animals and wild plants, Havelka faces up to five years in prison, a company ban and a fine. Energoaqua manages the factory site of the former Tesla in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm. It also provides wastewater treatment. They leave the area through a canal that flows into Bečva in Valašské Meziříčí in Vsetínsk.
According to the public representative Jiří Sachro, the company caused pollution of Bečva with poisonous cyanides and hexavalent chromium for at least 37 kilometers. The indictment states that this resulted in a massive kill of more than 39 tons of fish. The poisoning affected the river in the section below Valašský Meziříčí as far as Přerov, according to experts, the poisonous substances there damaged the biotope and the conditions for all water-bound organisms.
