© UkrinformA man walks on a chemical waste storage dump in the Ivano-Frankivsk city of Kalush on Feb. 18. Outgoing President Victor Yushchenko declared Kalush and surroudning villages an environmental disaster zone.
Ukraine - Chemical waste from years of salt mining endangers western Ukraine's water arteries that could potentially reach the Black Sea.
Ivan Debych stands at the snowy edge of a tailings dam outside of this town in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, observing what looks like a large frozen lake, but in reality is a lurking danger for millions of people in the region.
"If the dam breaks or overflows, its deposits will get into the river system, and contaminate the drinking water in the entire region," said Debych, who heads Kalush's department of emergency services. "The dam is our immediate concern."
The problem, Debych explained, is that this particular tailing dam is filled nearly to capacity with industrial deposits from the nearby mining enterprise at the Kalush-Holynsky potassium salt and potassium ore field. The 48-acre dam, known as Number Two, can hold another 100,000 cubic meters of matter before it spills over into the fields below. The situation is particularly critical in a year like this one, when large amounts of melting snow can quickly fill the dam to overflowing.
"If the dam breaks, it will flood the factories and homes in the area," Debych said, gesturing toward a field that is home to an oil refinery, a carpet factory and another plant producing window blinds. "It would take only seven, eight hours."
The dam is just a part of the problem, though. Because of decades of mining and the region's geography, pockets of ground occasionally cave in around Kalush. Many homes and elements of municipal infrastructure are facing collapse.
