The town's name is Geamăna, which is the female form of "the twin." I don't know if there was a twin town somewhere, but it's located in the Apuseni mountains in central Transylvania. The Apuseni are shorter than the mountains we live in. They almost seem like hills--they're rolling mountains, one after another with pastures and trees all the way to the top. They seem friendly.
This is also the location of Roșia Montana, the little town that's been recently making news and protest headlines as an international gold mining corporation was trying to open a strip mine right near the city that would provide some jobs but also create a open pit of cyanide from the runoff. The Romanian parliament didn't allow the project to get started (mainly due to pressure from large protests all over the country), and now Gabriel Resources, the corporation, is looking into suing the Romanian government for wasting their time and money.
Kelly and I have been to a few of these protests in Cluj, and I have to say that we're not in favor of a multi-national corporation destroying a zone that's on the list to become a UNESCO World Heritage site and leaving behind a lake of cyanide that could leak into the Danube. It seems like a destructive way to make a quick buck, and we're glad that Romania said no. But, when we went to Roșia Montana this past weekend to do activities for the kids' tent at an activist festival there, we were very open to hearing the other side of the story. The town is divided as to what's better, and we wanted to hear everyone out (even though we didn't get the chance).
After seeing Geamăna, I think that I'm more glad that Romania said no.
Our friend told us about Geamăna on the night we stayed at the festival. She told us that it was a little town like Roșia Montana, but the corporation had been allowed to strip mine for gold. She said that when they were done, they moved everyone out (except for one old lady who still lives there) and flooded the valley to hold all the toxic waste from the mine. I've heard of things like this, but I'd never seen it, so we decided to find Geamăna on the way back home.
A teenager from the village before Geamăna helped us get on the right road, and after driving 20 minutes uphill, we arrived at the pass into the valley. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the valley was still so green and lush, but there is a big, old, nasty-looking pipe that goes over the road. On the concrete support someone gaffitied "Don't forget Geamăna. Save Roșia Montana!"
It appears to be a valley like so many other valleys, but it's a lake in between the mountains, not more cute Transylvanian thatched roof houses.
But under the lake is where the houses were. Or still are. Our friend told us that sometimes you can still see the old church when the sludge is low enough. I'm not sure if this is part of the church, but it for sure used to be part of someone's life back when people lived in Geamăna.
We found the edge of the lake eventually. The picture, of course, can't capture how vast the dam is, but it's big. Probably 200 meters long, stretching from one side of the valley to the other, dividing the toxic from the natural, perhaps the cursed from the uncursed. I hope it holds. It kind of looks like they're trying to extend the dam into the lake.
All the trees that touch this lake are dead. They make a strange, sad barrier between the green-grey sludge and the vibrant, green forest that used to cover the whole valley. Again, I hope this line holds. The flooding began in the late 80s, so I have hope that the toxic waste has stopped where it is, but I wonder if it's creeping its way into the earth.
We also found the source. It's a pipe spewing grey water, presumably runoff from the stripped area up the mountain. Even though the trees right around the pipe continue growing, the leaves are covered in grey. We tried not to breathe while we drove past. And it's not just running, it's gushing out of a big pipe, down a grey gulley, into the grey lake. A grey lake that seems to be half hard on top from where the sun bakes the waste solid.
When we were leaving, we saw the old lady who still lives at the edge of the lake, at the entrance to her old village. We slowed down and said hello, but she didn't really look at us. I don't know if I could say hello to the people who came to take a quick drive around the village that I had lost forever. I think that it makes me want to say, "Don't forget Geamăna. Save Roșia Montana." Even though in this day and age, more and more people are moving out of the Romanian villages for the cities, and the inhabitants of Roșia Montana could make some money to move out if a strip mine opens, it still seems that it would be an awful waste of something so good for Roșia Montana to be covered by a pool of toxic waste. The water covering Geamăna reminded me of the water at Birkenau where the Nazis dumped ashes from the furnaces--a sickly greenish-grey color, and covering up something that too many people want to forget about. I'm not in a position of being desperate for money, but I still think that money isn't worth this.
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