Douglas Heaven, reporter
(Image: Palíndromo Mészáros/Barcroft Media)
NEITHER art installation nor photographic effect, this is the high-tide mark left by a million cubic metres of corrosive sludge that burst the banks of an industrial reservoir in Ajka, Hungary, in October 2010. Sweeping across farmland and through the villages of Kolontár and Devecser in waves up to 2 metres high, the red deluge swept cars off roads and damaged houses, before spilling into the river Torna, a tributary of the Danube. At least seven people were killed, over 100 injured, and many more displaced.
Visiting the site six months later, Spanish photographer Palíndromo Mészáros documented the effect on the landscape in a series of images he called The Line. The breached reservoir held caustic waste from a local plant that refined bauxite ore into an aluminium oxide known as alumina, the basic ingredient for manufacturing aluminium. Chief among the components of this by-product was iron oxide - hence the rust-red staining - but it also contained highly alkaline sodium hydroxide, used to dissolve aluminium oxide.
In the days following the flood, huge quantities of gypsum plaster and chemical fertilisers were tipped into rivers to bind the sludge and to neutralise its alkalinity. The Hungarian prime minister blamed human error. By the time Mészáros witnessed the aftermath, people had been rehoused and the red scar was fading - though toxic dust was still present in the air, he says.
In The Line, Mészáros had a purpose beyond capturing the haunting beauty of the disaster. "I think that we suffer an overexposure to images that leads us to a lack of sensitivity towards the big dramas," he says. The images depict "a terrible accident, not a beautiful installation", but it is the aesthetic impact that first grabs our attention. See the full series of photographs at www.palindromo.info.