On a slow trip back from hell: the infamous Black Triangle had the worst pollution ever recorded in the industrialized world. Now a sick and weary people are tackling their nightmare

International Wildlife, Jan-Feb, 1998 by Don Hinrichsen

The infamous Black Triangle had the worst pollution ever recorded in the industrialized world.

Now a sick and weary people are tackling their nightmare.

Stanislav Stys, an expert on land reclamation, stands on a reforested hill flush with the first gossamer buds of spring. As European blackbirds rummage through the forest litter for tasty insects, he gazes out across the city of Most in Northern Bohemia, the Czech Republic. Overhead in the leafy canopy, nightingales and chiffchaffs announce their territories and squabble for mates. Nearby, townspeople tend a vineyard cultivated on reclaimed mining land. On the other side of the city, bulldozers reshape a derelict open-pit mine into what will become a recreational lake and public park.

It wasn't always this way. Most is in the southern part of a grimy, lopsided wedge of industrial land--known ingloriously as the "Black Triangle"--that crosses borders into Poland and the former East Germany. The city sits in the Bohemian Basin of the Czech Republic, a 150 kilometer-long (100 mi.) valley hemmed in by the Ore Mountains to the west and the Bohemian Central Highlands to the east. It was founded in 1040 and rebuilt in the 1960s, becoming a center for the production of lignite. Lignite, which is still burned, is the brown coal that fired power plants and industry in much of the former Communist bloc. Because of it, the region has suffered from some of the worst pollution ever recorded in the industrialized world, its citizens ravaged by health effects almost unimaginable.

Now, with help from the European Community and the German government, Most and much of the rest of the Black Triangle are on a slow trip back from a human-made hell. Although one open-pit mine at Most is still gobbling away at the valley floor, leaving in its wake a moonscape of rubble, there are glimmers of hope. The changes in the city, gradual as they are, show that humankind can begin to escape from some of the worst environmental conditions that people have ever inflicted on themselves. "Since the 1960s, but especially during the past decade, we have reclaimed around 1,200 hectares [2,964 acres] of land that the mining company stripped bare for brown coal," says Stys, a geologist and former employee of the Most Mining Company.

What had plummeted the region toward its environmental abyss was a unique and nearly fatal geography. A natural cornucopia of coal waited to be gouged from the ground. It would feed Europe's growing appetite for fossil fuels, stoking its Industrial Revolution. Though mining in the foothills of the Ore Mountains began around 1400, it turned into a full-blown industry during the second half of the nineteenth century when the region became one of the premier centers for fossil-fuel extraction in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By 1910, miners were pulling close to 20 million metric tons a year (1 metric ton is the equivalent of a little over 1 ton) from the region's collieries.

Lignite, or soft coal, is an early phase of coal formation--somewhere between peat and hard coal. Lying close to the surface and relatively easy to extract with picks and shovels, it was first used by local residents to heat homes and cook food. However, since lignite is a relatively poor fuel in terms of energy value, it was never shipped far--no further than Prague to the south or Dresden (in eastern Germany) to the north. Instead, energy-hungry industries moved closer to the coal. In the nineteenth century, metallurgical companies, chemical plants and steel mills were among them. Beginning after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany in 1948, authorities accelerated industrialization, creating a vast tri-state complex of heavy industries fed by lignite.

By the 1960s, two million people, one of the densest concentrations in the country, were squeezed into this grimy industrial belt, beginning from the city of Chomutov in the southwest to Usti nad Labem and Liberac in the northeast. For the past half century this region has produced three-quarters of Czechoslovakia's brown coal, generated two-thirds of its electricity, refined 80 percent of its oil (imported from Russia on the "Friendship Pipeline") and produced most of its heavy fuel oil, fertilizers, pesticides and industrial process chemicals.

ignite's downside is that it is filthy--the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, producing heavy amounts of soot, ash, dust and heavy metals, along with sulfur and nitrogen oxides. Predictably, as the amount of coal mined annually increased from 20 million metric tons in the early twentieth century to around 100 million metric tons in the 1980s, the Black Triangle became a center of pollution. The Bohemian Basin, contained by mountains, suffered worst of all.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, more than 400,000 metric tons of soot, ash, dust and hydrocarbons along with 700,000 metric tons of polluting gases, mainly sulfur and nitrogen dioxides, plus unmeasured organic chemicals, smothered Northern Bohemia each year. Most of the pollution came from power plants and a host of outdated industrial complexes.