All roads led to Lake Nyos over the weekend, precisely on Saturday, March, 19, when technicians of the French company, DATA Environnement, completed the installation of two new pipes in the middle of the killer lake to permanently flush out dangerous carbon dioxide accumulating under the water to avoid another explosion and impending deadly consequences. Three months of work in continuum inside the lake enabled Michel Havar and his team to complete the second phase of the degassing exercise by reinforcing the first pipe installed in the lake in 2001 and implanting two new generation pipes with higher capacities to extract gas from under the lake. “The two pipes work faster and are capable of doing the work five initially programmed pipes could have done”, Joseph Victor Hell, Director of the Institute of Geological and Mineral Research (IRGM) said at the ceremony organised at the lake site to receive the prpoject.
The putting into function of the three pipes injected into the lake through platforms and remotely controlled from the control booth equally installed in the lake, marked the beginning of the end of fears as to whether or not the lake will one day excrete another chunk of gas into the air. To go by the scientists, the three pipes are capable of eliminating the risk by constantly removing extra gas accumulated under the water and reducing it to levels that are not dangerous to life. The installed system, according to Joseph Victor Hell, Director of the Institute of Geological and Mineral Research (IRGM), will be monitored from Yaounde. In other words, all that is happening in the lake especially as concerns the accumulation of gas and the stability of the system will be detected in Yaounde.
In the same vein, an alert device has been put up which detects the accumulation of gas and alerts the people to escape to the hills in case of an explosion. DATA Environnement has equally installed a meteorological system that collects facts concerning the weather (wind, temperature, rain, etc). For the project to come to fruition, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Cameroon government pumped in FCFA 1.8 billion.
Back to Land
The anxiety of the people that survived the 1986 explosion and were resettled in neighbouring villages to see the lake completely secured was quite visible on Saturday. The spirit that threads through their minds is that of regaining their homeland. “These people are eager to come back to their homeland, Ebue Ateh Jonas, Mayor of Zhoa Council, Fungom Sub Division told participants at the lakeside ceremony. In Bua Bua, one of the largest resettlement villages, many survivors who came from Subum, are boiling with anxiety to go back. “We don’t have enough land here for farming; we want to go back to our village where land is big and fertile”, Wandia Silvanus (27) told CT.
At the Nyos junction, situated about four kilometres from the lake, some natives have defied government’s instructions and have regained their homeland. Instead of driving them back to the resettlement camps, the authorities prefer to quicken the projects to secure the lake so that many more can come back. That certainly, is why the project to reinforce the natural dam is programmed to begin before the year elapses. The European Union recently completed the tarring of the three-kilometre stretch of the road from the Nyos junction up the steep hill to the lake to ease access. Many other projects are in the pipeline include road construction and maintenance and tourism site.
