LAGOS, Nigeria, Dec. 26 (AP) — A gasoline pipeline ruptured by thieves exploded into a blazing inferno on Tuesday in a poor neighborhood, killing at least 260 people in the latest oil industry disaster to strike Nigeria, Africa’s biggest petroleum producer.
Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters
Amid smoke and flames, rescue workers searched for bodies Tuesday after a gas line explosion in Lagos.
Braving a towering pillar of fire and a cloud of acrid black smoke in the Abule Egba neighborhood here, thousands of people searching for missing relatives crowded around rescue workers carrying away charred bodies.
“My brother, my brother,” cried Suboke Adebayo, 19, as an unidentified male body was loaded into an ambulance. Ms. Adebayo, a student, had spent hours trying to telephone her brother. “I’ve been calling him since this morning, but I can only hear a holding tone.”
A woman in a yellow T-shirt sobbed uncontrollably, slapping her own face and clawing her own arms in grief over the bodies and gutted cars spread around the pipeline.
Ige Oladimeji, a senior official for the Nigerian Red Cross, said his workers had counted 260 bodies by nightfall and had taken 60 injured people to hospitals. “We are still counting, but there will not be hundreds more,” he said.
Residents said a gang of thieves had been tapping the pipeline for months, carting away gasoline in tankers for resale.
Tapping is common in Nigeria, a major oil exporter, where many of the 130 million people live in woeful poverty amid widespread graft that makes a handful of people wealthy. One pilfered can of gasoline sold on the black market can earn the equivalent of two weeks of wages for a poor Nigerian.
But tapping also causes frequent accidents. In May, 150 people died in a similar explosion east of Lagos, and a pipeline fire in 1998 killed 1,500 in southern Nigeria.
The blast occurred after thieves opened the conduit during the night but left without fully sealing it, prompting hundreds of nearby residents to rush to collect spurting gasoline in cans, buckets and even plastic bags, witnesses said.
It was unclear what ignited the fuel just after dawn.
“There were mothers there, little children,” said Emmanuel Unokhua, an engineer who lives nearby. “I was begging them to go back.”
Mr. Unokhua said people had splashed fuel on him seeking to chase him away and doused a few police officers who had tried unsuccessfully to control the crowd.
“They were not arresting anyone, because they had no vehicle to put them in,” Mr. Unokhua said bitterly. “There are plenty of vehicles for the dead bodies now.”
Bodies lay scattered on the periphery of the site. A child’s flip-flop blistered by the heat and a half-melted plastic bucket were among the personal possessions among a fused mass of bones, skulls and charred limbs. Flames that nearly incinerated cars and melted electrical lines to pylons kept rescue workers away from much of the carnage until the fire began to wane early in the afternoon. Crowds of anguished people impeded the passage of fire crews and ambulances.
The pipeline, owned by Nigeria’s state-owned petroleum company, delivers refined fuel for domestic consumption, so the explosion was not expected to affect oil pumped for export.
Residents blamed greed, graft and poverty for the blast.
“This was a preventable tragedy,” said Joel Ogundere, a lawyer whose home is next to the site of the explosion.
Widespread corruption and mismanagement have left Nigeria’s refineries unable to meet demand, and fuel shortages are common. Christians heading home for Christmas and Muslims preparing for a feast day have jammed service stations for days across Lagos, a sprawling city of 13 million people. Many Nigerians contend they have gained little from decades of oil production in their country, saying natural gas flaring and oil spills have spread pollution, while they remain poor and a tiny elite grows rich.
“How can this be, that people are so poor in Nigeria that they will risk their lives for a little thing?” asked Bode Kuforiji, a university lecturer. “But boats leave for America every day filled with oil.”
THROWBACKTHISDAY; makes it 9 years and TBT Blog remembers.
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