Shanty town in Albania built on toxic time bomb

Thousands of Albanians are sitting on a toxic time bomb after abandoning their homes in the poorer north of the country to settle on the site of a disused chemical plant at Porto Romano, near the port of Durres.

The abandoned factory on the industrial outskirts of Albania's biggest port has swollen into a shanty town of almost 6,000 people, whose makeshift homes have been built in what the UN is calling an "environmental disaster area".

Under the isolated hardline Communist regime, the Durres plant produced sodium dichromate for leather tanning and pesticides such as lindane, a nerve poison banned in many countries. The factory closed in 1990 and the resulting wasteland is now home to a growing community, with more families arriving every day.

Dr Romeo Eftimi, the chief hydrologist assigned to the United Nations Environmental Programme (Unep), said yesterday: "People must be stopped from building more houses and fences must be erected to show people that this is dangerous."

Hundreds of tonnes of chemicals are covered by a shallow topsoil, while massive deposits of lindane and chromium have already sunk into the water table. The health implications of exposure to chromium 6 were given international exposure recently by the Hollywood film Erin Brockovich.

No signposts warn approaching visitors they are entering the contaminated zone. Instead, mounds of sickly green waste flank the roadside only yards from the playground of the local school. Hundreds of families live in homes built with contaminated bricks stripped from the derelict plant, and children play amid a forest of bare concrete posts, all that remains of the production line and storage depots.

Under Communism internal migration was prohibited. Freedom of movement was trumpeted as an accomplishment of Albania's first democratic governments and politicians are anxious to avoid actions that smack of the past regime, such as erecting fences.

One resident said 200 families had been relocated from the north of the country to the area by the government six years ago.

The Albanian government says international aid is needed to solve the problem. "We are committed to take responsibility, but alone we cannot afford this problem," said Tatjana Hema, the deputy environment minister. Unep estimates that the excavation, treatment and containment of the site would cost $10m (£7m).

Scientists say that groundwater samples from the site registered levels of chlorobenzene 4,000 times above the acceptable limit in European Union countries. Repeated exposure to chlorobenzene can damage the nervous system, bone marrow, liver, kidneys, blood and reproductive organs.

Dr Eftimi said: "This kind of poisoning doesn't show at once. This is why it isn't seen as dangerous by the people here."

For many in the settlement the arrival of Unep investigators last year was the first they learnt of the dangers surrounding them in their new home. "Another family arrived yesterday," said Lushi Bagami, who is one of the few who moved to the area just as the plant closed. The 32-year-old supermarket worker has suffered serious stomach and respiratory problems in the past two years.

"The first we knew about the pollution was when the tall man told us," he said, pointing to the Unep official John Bennett.

Local experts say that the priority must be to stop migrants moving into the contaminated area. Dr Eftimi has called for a four-step plan, to fence off the 200-hectare area, then move people, before investigating the site and implementing a containment plan.

Besnik Baras, chemistry professor at the university in the capital, Tirana, said: "The government is doing nothing. It doesn't have to be very expensive to create a permanent box using thick concrete, clay and sand."