The search for the causes of the fish deaths in the Oder did not produce any concrete results on Wednesday either.

At the same time, information is accumulating that does not put the Polish authorities in a good light.

Their omissions may go back even further than has become clear in the past few days.

Reinhard Veser

Editor in Politics.

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The Polish authorities downplayed the extent of the environmental disaster for a good two weeks after the first dead fish were found and only informed Germany a week ago when the fish die-off had reached that section of the Oder where it becomes the German-Polish border river - a circumstance , which both the Brandenburg state government and Federal Environment Minister Steffi Lemke (Greens) have criticized.

As recently as Wednesday last week, the head of the authority "Polskie Wody" ("Polish waters") Przemyslaw Daca said: "We cannot speak of a total catastrophe on the Oder." Just one day later he had radically changed his view: "We have dealing with a gigantic and outrageous ecological catastrophe.

To relieve attacks on Germany

It wasn't just the head of the authorities, Daca, who hadn't taken the matter seriously until the middle of last week.

Opposition MPs had already sounded the alarm at the beginning of August, but the responsible ministries did not answer their questions.

The parliamentary group leader of the national conservative governing party PiS, Ryszard Terlecki, answered the question about the situation on the Oder with the words: "I'm on vacation." According to research by Polish media, Poland's Environment Minister Anna Moskwa too.

Since the scale of the disaster can no longer be concealed, the Polish government has been trying to limit the damage to its reputation.

The opposition's demands for his resignation will probably remain without consequences for the time being.

But Poland's media recall that a Polish prime minister has already fallen because he initially didn't take a catastrophe on the Oder seriously enough.

After the Oder flood in 1997, left-wing head of government Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz had to resign.

The PiS seeks relief by criticizing Germany, among other things.

In his first public appearance on the environmental disaster, Prime Minister Morawiecki highlighted how much Poland is doing to clean up the river, but "there are no equivalent activities on the German side".

Zbigniew Bogucki, the governor of the West Pomeranian region, took the same line on Wednesday on public television: “The Germans have seen dead fish over 150 kilometers, because you can see them from the German shore as well as from the Polish one.

They have done absolutely nothing.”