A few days after villagers in Kedere in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta region noticed oil seeping from the pipe that runs beside the village, a few boys from the village went out with shovels, dug pits a few feet deep, scooped the oil into the ground and burned it, finally covering it with sand. "During the dry season, it looks nice," Anyakwee Nsirimovu, director of the Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Port Harcourt, told IRIN, describing the simple process which he said is a common spill clean-up tactic in the region.
The environmental damage caused by such poor clean-up methods could be disastrous, Emmanuel Emmanuel, an environmental scientist in Port Harcourt,
said. "Oil does not burn at 800 degrees Celsius," he explained, "so when you burn it, you just flare off the volatiles and gas. The dense crude remains... One drop of rain and you see the black spots," he said.
Across Kedere and similar villages in the region, evidence of the damage is readily apparent in the oil sheen on the soil and water.
"The land is devastated. The drinking water and streams are polluted. As it rains, we use the rain water but cannot drink it, because even that is full of crude oil," youth leader Amstel Monday Ebarakpor told IRIN. "At every groundwater intrusion, you see seepage. Sometimes you can see oil sheen on drinking water," he told IRIN. "Crude will be there for the next 50 years."
On 25 January the chairman of the government's National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, Bamidele Ajakaiye, told Nigeria's Senate Committee on Environment and Ecology that there are 1,150 abandoned oil spill sites in the Niger Delta region. Many, communities say, are cleaned like the one in Kedere - if at all.
Oil spills threaten the ground water in Nigeria. Oil spills are likely due to old, worn-out oil pipelines that rupture often. Ineffective oil spill clean-up methods have led to the contamination of bodies of water. The oil will likely remain in the water supply for about 50 years. Nigerian officials are not sure of their plan of action yet, but something must be done soon before the Nigerian citizens consume toxic amounts of oil from their drinking water.
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