Aluminium firm director held over Hungary's deadly red sludge flood

Police have detained the director of the aluminium company responsible for a flood of caustic red sludge that killed eight people when it burst from its reservoir last week as Hungary's prime minister said the state would take over the business.

Police said yesterday they were questioning managing director Zoltan Bakonyi on suspicion of public endangerment and environmental damage.

Prime minister Viktor Orban told parliament that the government wanted to take over MAL Zrt, the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company, because the safe restart of production at the alumina plant was needed to save the jobs of thousands of workers.

Mr Orban said his administration was also freezing the company's assets to ensure that funds were available to compensate for the damages caused by the disaster.

"Hungary's largest ecological disaster was caused by human negligence, by allowing a hazardous material to escape," Mr Orban said.

"We need to bring the company responsible for the red sludge spill under state control, and its assets under state closure," he told MPs.

Mr Bakonyi is the son of MAL's founder Arpad Bakonyi, who is the 28th richest person in Hungary with net assets worth $80 million according to a 2010 top list of business daily Napi Gazdasag.

MAL's chairman and co-owner Lajos Tolnay is 21st on the list.

In Devecser, one of several towns hit by the flood a week ago and where many people are employed at the alumina plant, Bakonyi's detention was met by mixed feelings.

"Someone surely has to held responsible, but he wasn't here when the reservoir was built so he can't carry all the blame," said 56-year-old caterer Maria Kiss.

"I never heard any of the plant workers complain about him."

The body of the flood's eighth victim, an elderly woman, was found yesterday afternoon near Devecser.

The woman was the last person reported missing.

In Kolontar, the town closest to the damaged storage pool, which is 25 acres in size, construction continued of a new containment wall to protect the area in case of a new flood.

The wall - 1,200ft long, with an average height of 9ft - was being built of dolomite rock and clay, the National Disaster Management Directorate said.

It is intended to be sturdy enough to protect the unaffected parts of Kolontar, from which more than 700 residents have been evacuated, as well as towns farther from the reservoir, like Devecser, in case of another flood.

Last week's sludge spill flooded three villages in less than an hour. Fifty people are still in hospital, several in serious condition.About 184 million gallons of the sludge was released.

The damaged reservoir still contains several hundred million gallons more of sludge, but it no longer has a large layer of water on top, so any new spills are expected to move slower and travel less distance.

Environmental state secretary Zoltan Illes said additional risks were centred on a reservoir next to the damaged one, which contained 27 million gallons of caustic liquid.

Authorities fear that, if the cracks on the broken reservoir's northern wall continued to widen and the wall falls, the second storage pool could also break, releasing a caustic flow.

Mr Illes said the new wall in Kolontar - which will be permanently incorporated into the town's landscape, with a bike path planned on its ridge - would withstand a flood even if the second reservoir burst.

Measurements taken in the past 24 hours showed no further movement of cracks on the northern wall, which experts have said is bound to collapse.

Health authorities warned the local population, as well as clean-up and construction crews, that the amount of red sludge dust in the air exceeded safe limits and said protective gear should be used.