NASA satellite image shows horrific scale of Hungary toxic sludge disaster

On October 9, 2010, the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured natural-color image of the toxic spill area in Hungary. Heavy machinery was put to work in the sludge affected village of Kolontar, Hungary, as construction continued on a containment wall to protect the area in case of a new toxic flood. The town was the worst affected of three villages flooded when a damaged storage pool dumped 700-thousand cubic metres (184 million gallons) of toxic red sludge over the area, killing at least eight people last week. The wall - 620 metres long (2-thousand foot) and an average of 2.7 metres (8.8 feet) high - was being built with dolomite rock and clay. The damaged reservoir still contains 2.5 million cubic metres 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, probably no more than 1 kilometre (0.62 miles), than the first one did.