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Hungary's massive toxic sludge spill may be just the tip of the ecological horrors in Eastern Europe 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"The scary thing is we didn't know this existed and there could be other ones," says ecologist Andreas Beckmann. "How many other facilities and sites are there that could be a ticking time bomb?"
Seven huge storage ponds about 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of Budapest hold 12 million tons of sludge accumulated since 1945 — more than 10 times the amount that spilled this week. "If the gates break there, much of Hungary's drinking water would be endangered,"said a World Wildlife official.
