Refugees 'will Get Cancer' in Waste Tip Homes

Thousand of refugees living on a chemical waste dump outside the main Albanian port, Durres, are condemned to liver disease and cancer by the chromium VI on the tip, a visiting expert said yesterday.

Many thousands more are in danger from eating fish from the Adriatic contaminated with lindane, another carcinogen, washed from the site.

The Albanian government was warned a year ago when the UN Environment Programme identified the dump as the worst environment hot-spot in the Balkans, but yesterday President Rexhep Meidani said he had no money to deal with it.

He spoke after an international group of 250 scientists, religious leaders and politicians visited Durres for a symposium on the pollution problems of the Adriatic, sponsored by the EU and the Eastern Orthodox Archbishop of Constantinople, Patriarch Bartholomew, who is taking part.

At the Durres dump experts were visibly shocked by the extent of the contamination.

They included Besnik Baraj, an Albanian chemistry professor, head of department at the University of Tirana, and expert on chromium VI and its effects, who was visiting the site for the first time.

"These children are bound to have kidney failure and liver cancer. It will take years, but it will come to all the people living here," he said.

"When the samples come into the lab we have to dilute them with water to measure them on the machines, because our calibrations do not go high enough.

"So I knew it was bad, but it hurts me to see this. The chil dren are innocent of what is happening to them.

"If they wash in this water the chemicals will be absorbed through the skin, if they eat a fallen apple they will be in mortal danger."

Children played around the dump yesterday. Three thousand people live in the contaminated area, and 10,000 use the water supply.

"This stuff is absorbed through the skin. In the lab we would always wear gloves to handle samples, but to see children here is frightening," Prof Baraj said.

The chromium VI could easily be neutralised by treatment with iron, he added. "We could probably cure the dump with £700,000. It seems so little."

A yellow stain, the sure sign of chromium VI, spreads across the valley, where local wells are sunk to draw water for drinking and washing.

There are 20,000 tonnes of potentially dangerous chemicals on the site, including thousands of tonnes of lindane, a banned carcinogenic pesticide, from a store at a disused factory. The chemicals were dumped near the shore and families converted the store into homes.

The groundwater, the local river and fish from a wide area of the Adriatic, sold in large quantities in the capital Tirana, are heavily contaminated with lindane There are no consumer warnings.

Saboli Lame, who lives on the site with his wife and two small children, said: "We have been told it is dangerous, but we have nowhere else to go."

The mayor of Durres, Miri Hoti, said he hoped to sell 23 hectares of the site to foreign investors for an oil refinery. The money could be used to clean up the rest of the tip.