IRIN Focus on Ogoni oil spill

At Yaata, a tiny village in the Ogoni area of southeastern Nigeria dying vegetation in various shades of ochre stretch as far as the eye can see, poisoned by soil turned soggy and a dark, greasy hue since crude oil began seeping through over a month ago. It all started with a huge bang on 29 April at the Royal/Dutch Shell Yorla oil field. The quake-like tremor sent shockwaves onto Yaata and surrounding villages. Within minutes, before people could guess the cause, jets of crude oil were already shooting up 100 metres - visible from a three-kilometre radius - and raining on the surroundings. “When this was quickly followed by strong fumes of natural gas, people knew it was time to run for dear life,” John Nwikine, a student from Yaata, told IRIN. “They knew from experience that any accidental fire was going to light up the area and spread as fast and as far as the fumes were going.” For nine days the shower of crude oil and gas poured on Yaata unabated. The rapidly resulting streams of crude oil swamped neighbouring farmlands, forests, streams and rivers in Kpean, Kwawa, Kono, Baen, Teera-ue and Buan; all in the Khana local government council of Rivers State. The Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), which defends the interests of the 500,000 Ogoni ethnic minority, estimates that up to 10 communities in all were affected to varying degrees by the spill. Though Shell was quickly alerted to the disaster, the oil giant appeared helpless. Its surveillance teams circled the scene in helicopters daily without landing. Bands of local youths quickly organised themselves into a vigilante, shielding people away from the scene and alerting inhabitants to the danger of lighting fires. The success of their effort limited what could have been a monumental disaster. Nevertheless, people in the areas pervaded by the fumes complained of breathing difficulties, in a number of cases combined with cough and runny noses. Shell, meanwhile, called on a US company for help. Experts from Boots and Coots International Well Control in Houston, Texas, capped the broken well-head on the ninth day. When Yaata’s residents returned they found their village was uninhabitable. Their maize, cassava and yam crops were stained with crude oil, wilted and dying. Much of their livestock had either died or were dying from eating polluted vegetation and drinking contaminated water. Dead fish rose to the surface of creeks and ponds. “No one needed to be told that we could not drink water from our streams and wells anymore or that we had lost all the expected harvest from the crops we laboured to plant earlier in the year,” Nwikine said. “So there was no point in staying.” The former inhabitants of Yaata have now resettled in neighbouring villages, hoping to return when the spill is cleaned up. More than five weeks later, this task has not started. All that has been undertaken, so far, are containment measures: basically, local labour has been used to dig trenches and ditches into which the streams of crude oil from the broken well-head have been diverted. “Essentially, what has set back the clean up is the position of MOSOP,” a Shell (Nigeria) spokesman told IRIN on condition of anonymity. He said MOSOP opposed Shell’s intent to send surveillance teams to the spill site. MOSOP said it opposed the visit because Shell had failed to consult the local people. “Since Shell did not consult with all the stakeholders in the Yorla blow-out, the security of the personnel of the oil company could not be guaranteed at the site of the incident,” the group said. The Yorla field is one of several in the Ogoni area, producing a total of 28,000 barrels of crude oil per day. It was abandoned by Shell in 1993 in the face of militant local opposition led by MOSOP. The group alleged there had been decades of neglect, environmental degradation and denial of access to the wealth produced on their land by the company and its joint venture partner, the Nigerian government. Subsequently, Shell warned that in its hurry to leave the area it was unable to apply all necessary procedures to ensure the safety of the shut oil facilities. MOSOP maintains that Shell ignored guarantees from local people that its employees would not be harmed if they came to make the wells safe, but this claim remains controversial. Relations between Shell and the Ogonis deteriorated further after military ruler General Sani Abacha in 1995 executed author Ken Saro-Wiwa, the MOSOP leader, and eight other activists after a murder trial widely viewed as flawed. Previous spills at the Yorla field, in 1993 and in 1999, came with major fires but locals and Shell officials admit these were relatively small in scale compared to the latest disaster. One highly contentious issue informing MOSOP’s position on the latest incident has been Shell’s claims that the blow-out was caused by sabotage. Oil multinationals in Nigeria routinely refuse to pay compensation for spills caused by sabotage. This has given rise to local fears that Shell is bracing to adopt a similar stance over the Yorla spill. Shell said a clean-up and other remedial steps would have to await the outcome of a joint investigation visit (JIV in industry parlance), comprising company and government officials as well as representatives of the affected communities, to the spill site. “We have been meeting with the people in the affected communities to choose their representatives so that we can undertake the joint investigation visit,” the Shell spokesman said. JIV will not only seek to determine the cause of the blow-out and the extent of damage it caused to the environment but also what remedial steps should be taken, the official said. Shell is also seeking safety guarantees to enable it secure its other facilities abandoned in Ogoniland. However, a Port Harcourt-based geologist, Soetan Igeniwari, said JIV was only useful for determining the short-term effects of an oil spill and tended to ignore the longer term effects. “The longer term effects of the series of spills we have had in the Niger Delta over these years is what I find most worrisome,” he told IRIN. “For instance, we are now in the rainy season and the Yorla spill has been there a month already,” he said. “Each time rain falls, the oil is washed deeper into the earth, polluting the underground water. And you can find the traces much farther from where the incident occurred. Who will take responsibility for that?”