IRIN Focus on emergency and disaster response

When an ammunitions dump at a military base in Lagos caught fire, setting off explosions that resulted in the death of over 1,000 people late last month, Nigeria’s readiness to deal with emergencies and disasters was put to the test. As billowing smoke surrounding huge tongues of flame surged toward the Oshodi-Isolo district adjoining the Ikeja military cantonment in Nigeria’s biggest city, residents took to their heels, fearing a war had come upon them. Hundreds of people, mainly women and children, tried to cross a drainage canal to safety. But they got mired in its mud and drowned. "Most of the people who died at that canal could have been saved if help had come early enough," Okey Chime, a resident of the district, told IRIN. "But we didn’t know of any emergency response office to call. The fire service had no working telephone numbers anyone knew of, and ordinary people were not much help in the darkness that came soon afterwards." The following day, it was still the local people who mounted the first rescue efforts in the area. They provided the canoes which volunteers used to pull out hundreds of bodies from the murky waters of the canal. It was only on the third day that dredgers and navy divers sent in by the government made their first appearance. Most Lagos residents, sent into a panic by the massive blasts that shook the city for over two hours, believe that lack of information about what was happening contributed a great deal to the high number of fatalities recorded. The first explosions started about 17:15 GMT (local time), but it was not until 20:00 hours GMT that Lagos State Governor Bola Tinubu and the commandant of the military base, George Endim, went on air to inform residents that there had been an accident at the armoury. In contrast to the huge death toll in the civilian neighbourhoods around the military base, very few lives were reported lost within the facility. This was attributed to the effectiveness of the emergency response initiated by the military authorities in the base. Once the fire was noticed, over 15,000 residents, including family members of an estimated 3,000-4,000 soldiers and officers at the Ikeja facility, were evacuated before the worst of the blasts got underway. Nigeria has a National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) which was established three years ago to provide timely and effective management of emergencies and disasters in country. Under the law that set up the agency, all levels of government - federal, state and local - were required to set up structures to deal with emergencies and disasters. However, the agency has yet to attain the expected level of effectiveness. "What I consider a problem does emanate from the fact that proper structures have not yet been put in place by government," Remi Olowu, Director-General of NEMA, told IRIN. "If the local and state governments had structures like ours, the response time would have been faster." Olowu explained that NEMA was not necessarily expected to have all the equipment required to manage all emergency situations and disasters. "We are required to collaborate with others and requisition equipment where necessary. We are also to use the military, but this time the military was affected," she said. "Yet divers from the navy were helping to recover bodies from the canal." NEMA was established in response to a string of disasters that afflicted Nigeria over the last decade. In 1992, a C-130 military transport plane on an internal flight plunged into a Lagos swamp three minutes after take-off with more than 260 people, mainly army officers, on board. Help was long in coming and when the aircraft was reached three days later, there were no survivors. In November 1996, a domestic airline from the southeastern town of Port Harcourt crashed into the Lagos lagoon with over 140 people on board. None of those on board survived. Their chances, too, had been diminished by a slow emergency response. Two years later, Nigeria faced another major disaster after a broken fuel pipeline burst into flames near the southeastern oil town of Warri while thousands of local people were massed at the site scooping petrol into containers. More than 1,000 people died in the incident. Hundreds of others have died since then in similar pipeline fires all over the oil region of the country. Emergency situations have also been created by the many outbreaks of ethnic and religious violence that have rocked Nigeria in the three years since President Olusegun Obasanjo's election ended more than 15 years of military dictatorship. The most recent case - pitting northerners against locals - occurred in Lagos in early February, close on the heels of the munitions dump disaster. More than 100 people died in three days of violence, that displaced more than 3,000 others. Prior to the establishment of NEMA, emergency aid, especially medical help and relief assistance, came from the Red Cross and, where women and children were concerned, the United Nations’ Children’s Fund (UNICEF). In recent times, however, all these organisations have worked together to deal with emergencies and disasters. NEMA, Red Cross and UNICEF worked jointly to evacuate people affected by the munitions dump disaster and recent ethnic clashes to safe camps where they were provided with food and medical assistance. Deinde Johnson, an expert in urban and regional planning, said poor city planning, particularly in Lagos, was a major impediment to the management of disasters on the scale of the armoury explosions. A law on urban and regional planning that dates back to 1917 should have been reviewed a long time ago, he said. "In practical terms what has happened all over Nigeria’s urban centres is that cities have grown over the past three decades without planning, without consideration to what could happen in times of emergency," he told IRIN. "This accounts for the fact that the Ikeja Cantonment, which was in the outskirts in the 1960s, has today been overtaken by built-up residential areas. What happened with the explosions could also happen with floods or any other major emergency." Government officials now acknowledge Nigeria’s low level of preparedness for disasters and emergencies. "We must train our people on how to react in emergencies," Obasanjo said in the aftermath of armoury disaster. "We will have other emergencies - it may be may be a fire, it may be a storm, it may be a tornado..."