These days, it has been three and a half years since the Piralen affair in Banja Luka’s Incel Business Zone shocked the public, and the remediation of the contaminated land has not yet been completed. And not only has it not been done, but there is no beginning, let alone an end, to the work on the removal of pyralene, given that there are still ambiguities regarding the authority to take measures to rehabilitate the land.
Even three and a half years after the incident when pyralen leaked in the Incel business zone, it is not clear who should remove this toxic substance from the contaminated land. The city claims that this should be done by the Ministry of Spatial Planning, Construction and Ecology of the Republic of Srpska. The Ministry says that they have completed their part of the work and that it is now up to the city to provide the necessary funds.
“The Ministry of Spatial Planning, Construction and Ecology of the Republika Srpska has respected its responsibilities. Now it is up to the City Administration to provide the necessary funds for the rehabilitation of the terrain. In these situations, we insist that the owners of contaminated plots bear part of the costs,” the Ministry states.
We have not received an answer from the city authorities as to what they intend to do about this and how they will find means to remove pyralene. But the profession and ecologists are not silent. They say that they have been warning about the pyralene problem for years and that there is no justification why it has not been removed yet.
“There is a lot of it in the land. It needs to be removed. And now everything is standing. It is standing for the reason that the estimate is around eight million marks, ten million marks for the removal of all that waste. So, it is a serious sum that the city administration cannot finance, neither on its own, nor the Ministry, I suppose, so this is now everyone’s and no one’s problem”, Tihomir Dakic, president of the Center for Environmental Protection Banja Luka, says.
“Obviously, all those who are in a decision-making system have taken some kind of tactic to ignore this problem again. So, basically, as far as I can see, the City and the Ministry and all other actors are currently happiest not to talk about it”, Milan Gvero, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Banja Luka, adds.
Pyralen, until its use was banned in the world, was used as oil for transformers. The kind of poison is best illustrated by the fact that it begins to decompose in nature only after 100 years, as well as that only 0.5 grams of direct intake into the human body is enough for acute poisoning. Longer exposure leads to cancerous diseases, BHRT writes.
