Over two months have passed since one of the greatest environmental catastrophes in the history of the Czech Republic: a poisoning incident that decimated the rich aquatic life along forty kilometers of the Bečva River. And the police have yet to find the perpetrator. Precisely a month ago, Deník Referendum ran an investigation showing why it is impossible for the poisoning to have originated from the sixteen-kilometer canal leading out of the industrial zone at the former Tesla plant in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm. The police pointed to precisely this possible cause on September 26th: six days after the accident.

On the contrary, our findings regarding the course of events showed that the most likely culprit is the Deza chemical plant, part of the Agrofert holding company owned by Prime Minister Andrej Babiš. However, Agrofert spokesman Karel Hanzelka has repeatedly and categorically stated that Deza “is not the cause of this environmental catastrophe.” Hanzelka has stated: “We have not registered any leaks of dangerous substances.” The head of Deza’s environment department, Jaroslav Obermayer, explained the same in a paid advertising interview in the newspaper MF Dnes.

Now, thanks to unique testimony from past and present employees of this chemical factory, Deník Referendum has learned that Agrofert is not speaking truthfully. On the contrary, an accident at one of Deza’s operations preceded the poisoning on the Bečva. And as the employee who caused the accident has confirmed for us, there is evidence for everything.

He has been fined two and a half thousand crowns for his offense. Deník Referendum has consulted the matter in full with several experts, Czech and international, who all agree that the given accident was capable of having poisoned the river to this extent.

Why did Agrofert cover up the accident? And what happened on that fateful night?

Since Thursday, September 24th, the poisoning incident on Sunday the 20th has been spoken of as a cyanide poisoning. However, Deník Referendum has inferred from responses by several laboratories and other institutions that cyanide was either not the main cause, or not the sole cause, of the poisoning in the Bečva—or may not have been the cause at all.

This is a fundamental turn of events in the whole affair. And we will return to these details to explain them in full, But first a few words about what happened at Deza.

An accident at Deza preceded the Bečva poisoning by mere hours

This accident occurred in the pre-dawn hours of September 20th, in the phenols operation—in a facility called a caustification unit. The phenols operation is the newest one in all of Deza; it has been running since 1994. The caustification process is used to produce lye, which Deza uses—as specified in a 2018 bachelor’s thesis by Jakub Kučera of the University of Pardubice—for “extracting phenol from carbolic oil, which is one of the fractions produced during the distillation of black coal tar.”

Caustification is an outdated method, and by all accounts Deza would not even be able to acquire a permit to engage in it today. This Babiš-owned chemical factory uses it because it is advantageous for them to process sodium carbonate in this way. This chemical is produced as one of the waste materials during phenol extraction. Meanwhile, Deza consumes too little lye for an investment into introducing the more modern electrolyte-based production method to pay off.

The caustification unit is run by a single operator. This is relatively undemanding labor; the workers speak of it as a “piece of cake.” The unit overall comprises two reactors and alternates between two processes: lye is “cooked” in the reactors and is then filtered off for further use and sent to reservoirs at the phenols operation.

The process is as follows: The caustification operator sends a command to the phenols operation, from which eighteen cubic meters of sodium carbonate travels from hopper H717 through pipe P706 into the reactor. The operator then adds six cubic meters of water and heats the mixture to 90 degrees. Next, a total of three cubic meters of slaked lime is added to it, and the desired product—concentrated lye solution—is then acquired from the resulting mixture by filtering away undissolved sodium carbonate.

Described like this, it can seem like a relatively harmless chemical reaction. After all, we all use both lye and sodium carbonate in our homes regularly. But the “soda” used for caustification at Deza is a waste material that, we must stress, is created directly at this chemical factory. It is not the pure white “baking powder” we all know, but a reeking black liquid that, besides sodium carbonate, also contains other toxic chemicals. Similarly, the water used throughout the process is “water from production” that can contain various residual substances.

On that fateful night, the operator at the caustification plant triggered the heating of this toxic mix at some point before midnight. Then, however, he fell asleep. The mixture overheated and began to churn. The reactor also contains mixing equipment. The mixing and the rapid boiling led to the mix spraying intensely from the reactor.

The caustification unit is supposed to have an alarm for such situations. However, as multiple sources have confirmed for us, that alarm has long been out of operation. The reactor should also have a stopper. But the stopper, for a change, has been raised and supported with a wooden plank. This was done because the gas-drainage plunger on the stopper had been clogging up too often.

And last but not least, an emergency tank directly beneath the caustification unit is there for catching leaks caused by accidents—this tank is also ringed by a concrete curbing meant to prevent any substances that might leak out of the unit from going where they should not. That is, into the rainwater drainage system.

On the night of September 20th, after the caustification operator had fallen asleep, all the safety measures failed. The seething toxic cocktail sprayed out to a distance of up to several meters past the emergency tank’s curbing—directly onto the road in front of the caustification unit, and here it all dripped down into two adjacent apertures of the rainwater drainage system. The instruments recording “trends in production”—i.e. the statuses of the hopper, lye, and reactor—showed that a total of twelve cubic meters of the mixture escaped during the accident.

The worker during whose shift the accident happened has confirmed the accident, including a number of details, for Deník Referendum. However, we have decided not to publish his name. We do not believe that the fault for the accident, and especially for its cover-up, lies with him, and therefore we believe that the public’s attention should be focused on the real culprits.

What did the killing?