by Zach Bigalke

Created on: January 24, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

Nestled in a quiet corner of the Transylvanian region of Romania, tucked between fertile valleys and forested hills, lies a village marred by the industrial wanderlust of Stalinist impositions in its satellite states. A ghost town lying upstream from the Tarnava Mare river, Copsa Mica was a sleepy hamlet of several thousand when the first industrial operations appeared in the area in 1935. As Romania came under Soviet persuasion and accelerated its industrial ardor, the village was earmarked for a production boom that would eventually tarnish and poison the place and people that would bear the costs without reaping any benefits. Two factories would play a central role in the introduction of industrialization to the valley and the environmental abuses of the next five decades.

Carbosin, founded in 1936, produced carbon black for the production of rubber. A main beneficiary of Romania's drive toward industrial nationalization following its designation as a Soviet satellite state in 1947, Carbosin was pressed into increasing levels of service with few modernizing efforts to lessen the strain - or its polluting potential. After Nicolae Ceausescu's conquest of autocratic control in 1965, the factory was a lynchpin in his pursuit for a greater international industrial presence for Romania. But, unwilling to spend money for even simple maintenance and upkeep, the factory fell further into disrepair. Filters went unchanged, machines lost crucial parts, and the short smokestacks poured increasingly high concentrations of escaped carbon soot on the village and the surrounding countryside. As quotas increased through the 1980s, the factory expelled seven tons of carbon each six-hour shift over a twenty-five mile radius. Finally recognized as the most-visible polluter in the area, Carbosin was closed in 1993 after fifty-seven years of ravaging the air and landscape of the village and surrounding environs. The closure put 1700 people out of work, still contaminated but with no way to even support themselves on the tainted soil.

SOMETRA, founded in 1939, is responsible for the greater brunt of the damage wrought on the small corner of Sibiu County. While the stains from Carbosin's black expulsions are still visible over ten miles from the smokestacks twelve years after they last spewed carbon into the Transylvanian air, the heavy-metal contamination from the non-ferrous metallurgical smelter has been the key culprit in the disastrous lead contamination of the area. As Ceausescu

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