The workshop, which held recently in Zhoa in Fungom Subdivision, was to enable community leaders better prepare for any eventuality.

Almost 30 years after the August 21, 1986 deadly gas leak in Lake Nyos in Fungom Subdivision, Menchum Division of the North West Region, stakeholders are already preparing local people on how to handle any such occurrence in future. It is in this light that the Yaounde-based Institute of Geological and Mining Research, IRGM and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, JICA, on February 4, 2016, organised a workshop for local community disaster management members.

The one-day training held in Zhoa, headquarters of Fungom Subdivision, about 100 km from Bamenda, the regional capital. The objective was to disseminate results of the five-year Lake Nyos degassing project, SATREPS NyMo. Speaking at the event, the Japanese Ambassador to Cameroon, His Excellency Kunio Okamura, stressed the importance of sharing the research results with community members. He said the SATREPS NyMo degassing project had helped in greatly reducing the risks of CO2 gas accumulating under water to pose any threat to inhabitants in surrounding communities like it was the case in 1986.

Opening the workshop, the Senior Divisional Officer, SDO for Menchum, Emvoutou Bita Benoit William, lauded the Japanese government for its technical and financial support to the degassing project worth about 1.4 Billion FCFA. He noted that the project has been successful, thereby paving the way for people displaced by the disaster to eventually return to their ancestral land. The SDO also appealed for more international support to assist the 1986 victims.

Earlier, the Mayor of Zhoa Council, Tem Peter Cheghe, felicitated government and its development partners for the efforts made in assisting victims of the disaster, but noted that more was still expected like better roads, social amenities and hastening up the process to declare the Lake Nyos area risk-free. Topics handled at the workshop included General Disaster Management Framework in Cameroon, What the SATREPS NyMo Project is all about, Lake Nyos: Past, Present and Future, the Lake Nyos Dam and an Overview of the National Programme for Securing and Rehabilitating Lake Nyos.