Also see: Nigeria Experiences Exxon Valdez Size Spill Every Year
"Oil spills devastate Nigerian delta, UN says" August 05, 2011|Associated Press
LAGOS, Nigeria - A region of Nigeria’s oil-rich southern delta is suffering widespread ecological damage as spilled oil seeps into its drinking water, destroys plants, and remains in the ground for decades, according to a UN report released yesterday.
Which is amazing because it all disappeared on the US Gulf Coast in less than a year.
The report said it will take as long as 30 years to clean the oil-stained Ogoniland area within Nigeria’s Niger Delta, a region of swamps, mangroves, and creeks almost the size of South Carolina. The world body suggested the Nigerian government and the oil industry set up an initial $1 billion trust fund for the cleanup.
However, environmental cleanup remains an afterthought in Africa’s most populous nation as oil revenues fund a corrupt government dependent on production. Cleaning up the more than 600-mile region would be a challenge for any government, the report acknowledged....
Though production in Ogoniland stopped in 1993, pipelines and flow stations operated by a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell PLC and the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. still run through villages and fields.
Oil spills from those sites, caused by aging pipelines and vandalism, have devastated the land, the UN found. In one case, the United Nations found a village where drinking water was polluted with benzene 900 times higher than the international limit.
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Related:
"Lead poisoning plagues Nigerian villages" by Associated Press / January 8, 2011
LAGOS, Nigeria — A lead poisoning outbreak that has killed more than 400 children in the rural farmlands of northern Nigeria remains “a neglected, underfunded emergency,’’ the United Nations warned yesterday, saying many villages remain coated with the deadly metal....
The U.N. is a failure.
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No goal for Nigeria.
The report released yesterday also said that one of the two villages already decontaminated now shows new traces of lead and mercury — a sign the desperately poor in the remote area have again begun mining and processing the gold ore with lead deposits that started the crisis.
With all that oil wealth?
“Zamfara state is seeing the health and well-being of its children put in grave danger by this acute and ongoing disaster,’’ the report warned. “More rapid and coordinated intervention is imperative. . . . Hundreds have been lost already, and thousands more are at risk.’’
And yet it is a one-day wonder in my newspaper -- on a Slow Saturday, no less.
The existence of gold deposits in this area along the border with Niger had been long known. But it wasn’t until gold prices soared in recent years that villagers began heading into the bush to search for it. Soon the herdsmen and farmers could sell gold for more than $23 a gram — a huge sum in a country where most people live on less than $2 a day.
However, the ore brought back to the villages in Zamfara early this year contained extremely high levels of lead. Fathers carried the precious rocks home to store inside their mud-walled compounds. Wives often broke the rocks and ground them, sending dust and flakes into the villages’ communal areas.
It wasn’t until 160 children died and others went blind and deaf that authorities realized the region faced a lead poisoning outbreak. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called the crisis “unprecedented.’’ An international team of doctors and hazardous waste experts arrived in Zamfara in mid-May to clean the region, but seasonal rains halted their work.
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