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Nothing predicted what would happen on the morning of October 30, 1971. People were still sleeping in their homes when the disaster struck at 5:00 pm
The dam at the Certej mine tailings dam broke and spilled everything in its path.
People didn’t even want to react to save their lives.
Everything happened fast. People kept sleeping
In just a few minutes, the cyanide erased the surface of six apartment blocks with 25 apartments, a 30-room house, seven single-family houses and 24 homes.
In order to hide the truth about the disaster, the news appeared in the press that only 7 people died. Authorities later reported 48 dead. The truth was completely different. In the end, 89 people were said to have died from cyanide.
Those who survived the tragedy say that, in fact, 180-200 people, including entire families, lost their lives on the fateful day of October 30, 1971. The cyanide burned their faces, many could no longer be recognized. and they were buried as strangers.
The conclusion of the communist authorities
The conclusion appears in the report of the General Prosecutor of the Socialist Republic of Romania of December 4, 1972. The report is accompanied by a note – presented by militiaspirituala.ro – with the signature “of comrade. Ion Dincă ”, Ion Teleaga also said.
“The rupture of the tailings dam was due to the concurrent action of unpredictable factors, as a result of underwater geomechanical and hydrophysical phenomena, not yet fully clarified by science and technology”, states the document.
Some images of the disaster have been kept on file.
The director and screenwriter George Adamescu made a documentary in 2015 in which several witnesses to the accident at Certej tell how they saved some of those caught by the cyanide wave.
Memories of the hell of death
The memories are extremely painful, and those who have survived have tears in their eyes when they speak of the tragedy.
They talk about corpses without clothes and how they fought to get the survivors out of the cyanide stain, washing them of the mud that had entered their mouths.
“It was Friday morning, at five in the afternoon, when I felt that the cabin was shaking. When I saw a white sour cream coming from the hill. The neighbor, who was a miner, had come from the second shift, took his lamp and left, and then he realized: “Know that the jug was broken,” says one of the witnesses to the tragedy.
Then my brother destroyed their house, 3, a two-month-old, 24-year-old boy, a 26-year-old sister and a child died in the house. And one escaped. I heard her scream, come on, we had a car in the house. But half the house was gone, that strong breath cut through it, just like you would cut it with a chainsaw. There was nothing left, no brick, nothing, “says Ioan Chirlă, according to descopera.ro
