"The ministry has doubts about whether the warning system worked properly," says Karolina Šulová, a spokeswoman for the Environment Ministry, which is promising an investigation into what it calls a breakdown in communication and possible attempts to cover up the accident.

Investigators are looking in particular at the Draslovka chemical company in Kolín, which has now admitted that a technical glitch in one of its wastewater pits sent 2 cubic meters (71 cubic feet) of toxic cyanide into the river. Tests confirm the leak occurred Jan. 9, but the investigative arm of the Environment Ministry, Czech Environmental Inspection (ČIŽP), did not learn something was wrong until Jan. 12, when local fishermen began reporting thousands of dead fish in the river.

The ministry did not conclude that fish were dying from cyanide poisoning until Jan. 16. Draslovka did not take responsibility for the leak until Jan. 17.

"If Draslovka knew about this since [Jan. 9], then I ask what happened to fulfilling the law under which such events are to be reported," says Václav Jiřásek, director of the Labe Basin Management, the authority that oversees the river.

"We lost four to five days trying to figure out what caused the pollution. To not report it is like driving away from a road accident," he says.

ČIŽP says it will begin an administrative hearing into Draslovka's culpability, though it has not set a start date, and the company faces a fine of up to 10 million Kč ($421,760).

Jiří Holub, the company's production director, says ČIŽP did not alert Draslovka about a possible leak from its facility until Jan. 13 and that the company would have "immediately declared an emergency situation" if it had been aware of what was happening sooner.

"We know with nearly 100 percent certainty that drinking-water sources have not been affected by the toxic cyanide leak," ČIŽP spokeswoman Eva Rolečková says. The reason for this, she says, is that the cyanide contamination was heaviest in the river's bottom waters, which never seep into wells. She says experts from the Water Industry Research Institute were nevertheless testing drinking water sources in the area.

Still, some 10 metric tons (11 short tons) of fish valued at 500,000 Kč are dead as a result of the leak, and environmentalists say it will be years until fish stocks will rebound to normal.

Angry Germans

Draslovka is not the only entity facing scrutiny, and the government is not the only one angered by a slow response to the accident.

The daily newspaper Mladá fronta Dnes reported a few days after the leak that the town hall in Kolín knew about it Jan. 10, but did not notify Prague authorities.

Vladimír Gladkov of the town's water department rejects that assertion. On that date, he says, only about 100 dead fish had surfaced in Kolín's stretch of the Labe — "nothing unusual" for the town during wintertime, he says.

Nevertheless, since the Labe becomes the Elbe when it crosses the German border at Děčín and flows on to Dresden, the accident has drawn criticism from the German state of Saxony, which was not notified about the leak until Jan. 16.

"We are dissatisfied with the late warning," says Irina Duevel, spokeswoman for the Saxon environmental department. "We will definitely refer to this lack of information at our next conference with Czech environmental authorities."

Contamination diluted

But environmental investigators say measures to speed up the dilution of the contaminated water before it crossed into Germany worked, and Duevel confirmed that tests on the Elbe near Dresden showed nothing to cause alarm.

The Labe Basin Management authority reported Jan. 22 that levels of cyanide in the river had dropped to a point not considered contaminated. Karel Dostál said that was a result of water managers in Mělník, central Bohemia, increasing water flow from the Vltava River's reservoirs there. The Vltava joins the Labe at Mělník, and the increased water levels sped up dilution.

Meanwhile, Draslovka, the chemical company, met with representatives of the Central Bohemian Fishermen's Union (SČSR) Jan. 19 and agreed to compensate local workers for the accident, an agreement neither side is detailing publicly.

Pavel Horáček, head of the SČSR, would only say the company agreed to pay fish farms an amount of money substantial enough to help locals restore fish quantities in the Labe to their pre-spill number within three years. Donations to the union are pouring in: The Central Bohemia Regional Office has offered 200,000 Kč, and some private donors have given as much as 1,500 Kč each.

"We need a complex picture of the damage," Horáček says, noting that that may be months away. "Experts will tell us what new fish need to be placed in the river, and only then will we be able to say if the financial help from Draslovka is adequate."