TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/86/86.2

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 12.8 KB | 240 lines

                                                                                September 8, 1986

WORLD

The Lake of Death


A lethal cloud devastates three villages, killing at least 1,700
people

The only warning was a nocturnal rumble that resembled distant
thunder. Then a silent plume of colorless gas shot up from the
turbulent depths of Lake Nios, just inside Cameroon's northwest
border. Within minutes, the heavy fumes of carbon dioxide burst
over the rim and sank into the valley below, enveloping sleepy
hamlets in a deadly bubble. Villagers who had already bedded down
for the night quietly suffocated in their sleep.

Others tried to outrun the deadly cloud, overturning tables,
chairs and cooking pots as they fled their mudbrick huts. Some
desperately stripped off their dresses and shirts to escape the
burning caused by the gas. Later they were found only yards from
their crumpled clothes, overcome by asphyxiation. "I saw people
dying, people dead all around," recalled Ephrem Ngong Kum, 24, of
Su-Bum, a village some 200 miles northwest of Yaounde, Cameroon's
capital. "They died in the houses, in streets, outside the
forest, in the stream."  Fellow Villager Chia David Wambong
remembered a warm feeling, as if he were durnk. "Everyone
started to cough, and some people vomited blood," he said. "I
saw people on the ground screaming. Everyone was crying."  When
the cloud lifted, there were few survivors to mourn the dead.

It will never be known how many died in probably the worst natural
calamity ever to strike the quiet west African country. The U.N.
Disaster Relief coordinator in Geneva put the toll at 1,746, but
the number may be far higher. National army units, fearing an
epidemic, quickly buried the decomposing bodies, never pausing to
keep count. More corpses were hastily buried by kin from
neighboring villages. "There are mass graves because we only had
a few laborers, and we could not dig individual graves," Lieut.
General James Tataw, commander of the rescue operation, told
reporters. "Those who have individual graves, those were dug for
them by their relatives. The cows have no relatives, so their
burial will be last."

By week's end the Cameroon army had laid to rest most of the
populations of the three hardest-hit villages:  Nios, Su-Bum and
Cha. At least 300 people, many of them farmers from the
surrounding hills, clogged the area's few hospitals, sharing beds
with other victims while they awaited treatment for shock and
burns.

Perhaps another 3,000 refugees, displaced from their homes on the
fringes of the affected 10-sq.-mi. area, were evacuated by army
troops. All told, it was estimated that 20,000 lives were upended
by the freakish disaster that was aptly, if ineloquently described
by M. Peter McPherson, administrator of the U.S. Agency for
International Development, as a "Ripley's Believe It or Not
event."

Meanwhile, the Cameroon army struggled to navigate bulldozers over
the precipitous mountain climbs and into the villages to dig
graves for the dead livestock. But the primitive dirt tracks,
which provide the only access to the hamlets for some 40 miles
around, were muddied by pelting rains. Therefore the burials were
slowed considerably while troops laboriously dug the graves by
hand. Officials began to fear that the bloated carcasses of cows,
goats, pigs and chickens rotting in the equatorial heat would lead
to a cholera or typhoid epidemic.

Army efforts were further hampered by the handful of survivors who
refused to leave their lifeless villages. In Cha, Kumba
Ndongabang sat beneath a thatched platform, staring at the two
graves where his five wives are now buried. "All my women die,"
he grieved, his voice rising and falling with the simple rhythms
of the native Pidgin English. "If I go, who make home for me?
Where I go?  Where I find home?  Where life?"

Despite government efforts to seal off the remote villages, a few
local tribespeople insisted on returning at midweek to the lands
farmed by their ancestors. Their homecoming could not have been
a happy one. As the Rev. Fred Tern Horn, a Dutch priest who
serves in the area, described the scene, "it was as though a
neutron bomb had exploded."  All of the huts and buildings
remained intact, and the mountains and tropical forests appeared
unscathed. But almost no life stirred for miles around.

Lake Nios, affectionately dubbed the "good lake" by local
residents, no longer shimmered a welcoming blue. Instead, the
waters had turned a drab shade of reddish-brown, clay having been
churned from the lemon-shaped lake's depths. The village that
shares the lake's name showed no signs of life, save the rescue
crews. Of the hamlet's almost 1,200 residents, only four,
including a woman and her child, are believed to have survived.
Five miles away in Su-Bum, army troops found a scrawny chicken
dancing a macabre two-step atop a fresly dug family grave. "All
the people, the goats, the pigs and the cows died," said Lieut.
General Tataw. "What surprises me is how that chicken survived."

More miraculous, so did a handful of villagers who haltingly
recounted the tale of the poisonous cloud. Sometime between
9 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Aug. 21, families were finishing their
evening meal and settling down for the night when the volcanic
lake bed erupted. Some villagers remembered hearing a distant
sound. Then a strange odor permeated their huts. "It was like
burned gunpowder," suggested one survivor. Another likened it to
"eggs, bad eggs."  When villagers began to feel dizzy, panic set
in. People who were not killed immediately fled into the dirt
streets. Many were later found in the bush, their hands vainly
clasped over their noses and mouths.

Even the few who survived were knocked unconscious for what they
believe was hours. When they awoke, they found the nightmare had
only just begun. "Oh, they die plenty!" cried Peter Sam Kinbi, 42
of Su-Bum. "You go to one compound, and they all finished. You
go to another compound, and there is one man and maybe one child
living. They all dead. When you touch them, they be like stone
and they be white spot (dried spittle) on they mouths and on the
ground. My wife, my six children, all dead."

Word of the tragedy did not reach the town of Wum, just ten miles
west, until late the next afternoon. A government employee who
had been motorcycling to Nios from Wum first discovered the
disaster. When he came upon a dead antelope, he thought he had
had a stroke of luck, and happily strapped the animal to his bike.
But when he got closer to Nios, the impact of what had happened
struck him as he saw more and more bodies of people and animals.
Fighting back dizziness, he returned to Wum. Late that day, his
ghastly report finally reached Yaounde.

Even then, officials did not grasp the enormity of the problem.
They apparently assumed that the fallout from Nios would be no
more severe than a similar incident two years ago. Moreover,
authorities were distracted by the impending arrival of Israeli
Prime Minister Shimon Peres, the first such visit by an Israeli
head of government to a black African state in 20 years. Although
Peres and Cameroon President Paul Biya signed an agreement
renewing diplomatic relations, their meeting was quickly upstaged
by the drama evolving on the northwestern border.

Indeed Peres' visit may be remembered less for any savvy
statesmanship than for his swift response to the emergency. Just
three hours before Peres was to make his flight from Tel Aviv to
Yaounde, the first reports of the gas disaster begain to circulate
outside Cameroon. Half a ton of medical supplies was promptly
loaded onto the Prime Minister's Israeli air force Boeing 707, and
a 17-member army medical team was hastily assembled to accompany
the official party. Although the Israeli group landed in Yaounde
last Monday, the crude internal travel conditions made it
impossible for the medics to reach victims hospitalized in Nkambe,
some 60 miles from the disaster zone, for another two days.

By then a full international relief effort was under way.
Washington dispatched two crews of scientists and physicians to
the disaster site, one team assigned to identify the specific gas
involved in the catastrophe, the other to study what had happened
and determine whether a recurrence was possible. The $250,000
U.S. aid package, which included tents and food supplies, came in
response to a request from Biya for assistance. Canada, Britain,
West Germany and Spain also responded to the call, sending money
and tons of medical and food supplies. Cameroonian officials, as
unsettled by the onslaught of relief aid as by the crisis itself,
quickly set up a national disaster committee. "Our first
priority," announced Committee Chairman Jean Marcel Mengueme, "is
to set our priorities."

A top one was to provide immediate shelter, food and consolation
for the refugees who continued to stream out of the afflicted
hillside settlements. Late last week army vehicles, Land Rovers
and pickup trucks moaned up and down the rain-sodden paths,
shuttling evacuees and their possessions to Wum and Nkambe, where
doctors, social workers and such conveniences as running water,
electricity and telephones awaited.

Many tribespeople made the journey on foot, juggling colorfully
wrapped loads of household goods on heir heads. Along the way,
dead cows and birds dotted the hills. Some refugees tucked cotton
in their nostrils to dampen the sickening stench of decomposing
animals. The surviving white Brahman cattle lumbered dumbly at
the sides of the columns, responding sleepily to the harried
urgings of herdsmen carrying long, thick sticks.

Certainly, the various medical specialists will want to know why
some villagers and animals were able to survive the deadly cloud.
Colonel Michael Wiener, the physician who headed the Israeli
medical team, speculated that survivors may have been positioned
in air currents that somehow escaped contamination. At least one
survivor's good fortune involved more than plain luck. Dennis
Chin of Su-Bum told reporters that he had been lyng on his bed
when the choking gas descended. As he gasped for air, Chin
dragged himself to a windowless shed behind his house, where
presumably there was enough oxygen to enable him to wait out the
calamity.

It is uncertain what the long-term health effects of the gas will
be on people in the region. Chin's fellow villager, Wambong, for
instance, has yet to recover feeling on one side of his body.
Most of the survivors, however, seem to be in fairly good
condition. Despite the fact that there are lingering respiratory
problems, doctors say the worst is over. Still, secondary
infections are anticipated. Indeed, by week's end one Israeli
medic had treated at least 50 cases of pneumonia, and more were
expected to follow.

The economic costs of the tragedy are difficult to calculate. The
impact on the immediate area is likely to be devastating, although
the effect on the entire country will be minimal. Compared with
most of its fellow African states, Cameroon is well off. As a
leading exporter of coffee and cocoa, the California-size land is
one of the most economically stable countries on the continent.
While much of Africa is hunger plagued, Cameroon (named by
Portuguese settlers after the camaroes, or large pink prawns,
found in vast quantities off the country's Atlantic coast) has
achieved virtual agricultural self-sufficiency.

The country's 10 million people enjoy a per capita annual income
of $820, more than four times that of Africa's poorest countries.
Strong economic ties to the U.S. and other Western countries have
further enhanced Cameroon's well-being. An enduring link with
France, one of its many former colonial overseers, has enabled the
country to develop its oil reserves.

But the gas disaster could be a blow to the area's agricultural
output. The noxious cloud settled over fecund farmland, and the
long-term costs could be significant. "The farmers here were
famous," said an official from the Wum Area Development Authority.
"They grew good crops and healthy cattle. This is a rich valley.
The farms are the best in the whole region."  Unfortunately, the
lands surrounding Lake Nios may have to be evacuated permanently
if scientists determine that a recurrence seems likely.

For now, the villages still seem haunted by the ghostly reminders
of what used to be. Children's toys and clothes litter the huts,
bicycles lean carelessly against back walls, stew cakes in pots,
crumpled bed sheets still bear the impress of daily life. But in
the now deserted streets, no men chatter. No women call to their
children. No chickens squawk. No insects buzz. "The silence is
so deep," whispers a visitor to a relief worker. "I try not to
listen," the medic responds. Yet it is all but impossible not to
hear the echoes of the tragedy.

By Jill Smolowe. Reported by B.J. Phillips/Nios