Delta Villages Fear Troops

Right: A Niger Delta family in Nigeria

Villagers fled Nigeria's lawless delta on Wednesday amid fears of military reprisals after a wave of attacks on foreign oil companies by ethnic Ijaw militiamen.

The army deployed more troops to major installations, and oil companies tightened security around offices a day after heavily armed men stormed the headquarters of the Italian oil firm Agip, robbing a bank on the premises and killing eight policemen and a civilian.

"There are soldiers everywhere, and I don't want my three girls in the firing line," said Return Powei, who lives in the remote village of Ogbotobo. "Our youths run into the forest when they hear the soldiers are coming. Everyone is moving out of Ogbotobo."

It was not clear if the attack on Agip, a unit of ENI of Italy, was the work of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, whose five-week campaign of sabotage and kidnapping has contributed to an increase in oil prices.

The group said it would make Royal Dutch Shell suffer unless it paid $1.5 billion to delta villages in compensation for decades of oil pollution, which is one of its demands for releasing four foreign hostages.

The government has set up a committee to negotiate the release of four oil workers kidnapped Jan. 11.

Volcano Threatens Half Million Nigerians

(L) Lake Nyos Death Volcano (R) Dead livestock 1986


President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria has expressed concern over the threat of volcanic activity at Lake Nyos, Cameroon, near the border with his country. More than 600,000 tons of poisonous gas has saturated the waters and is threatening the lives of about 500,000 Nigerians. He said the problem is of immediate concern.

On Tuesday, Obasanbjo opened the 1st National Summit of Disaster Management and Emergency Preparedness at the statehouse in Abuja. The volcano at Lake Nyos had its last major eruption in 1986.

Lake Nyos is the most renowned of the numerous maars and basaltic cinder cones associated with the deeply dissected Mount Oku massif. The 1.2 x 1.9 km wide lake, seen here from the south, was the site of a gas-release event on August 21, 1986 that caused at least 1700 fatalities. Wave damage stripped the peninsula at the left of vegetation. The emission of around 1 cu km of magmatic carbon dioxide has been attributed to either non-volcanic overturn of stratified lake waters, to phreatic explosions, or to injection of hot gas into the lake.

On August 21,1986, a cloud of carbon dioxide gas was released from Lake Nyos. Because carbon dioxide is more dense than air it hugged the ground and flowed down valleys. The cloud traveled as far as 15 miles (25 km) from the lake. It was moving fast enough to flatten vegetation, including a few trees. 1,700 deaths were caused by suffocation. 845 people were hospitalized.

Other reports stated when Lake Nyos, located in northwestern Cameroon, first erupted in 1986, over 20,000 persons were either killed or displaced by the carbon dioxide gas from the lake. And in October last year, a UN study revealed that the natural dam in Lake Nyos could collapse any moment from now and heightened fear of mass death from the carbon dioxide emission from the collapsing lake.
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