US bomb disposal team arrives in Lagos

A 60-member US army bomb disposal team from the US army arrived in Lagos on Wednesday to start work on neutralising unexploded munitions dispersed when a 27 January fire triggered explosions at an armoury in Nigeria’s commercial capital. A spokesman for the team, Major William Thurmond, told a news conference on Tuesday that people living within 500 metres of the Ikeja Military Cantonment, where the disaster occurred, would be evacuated while the group was at work. Actual disposal work, he explained, would be preceded by a detailed survey of the military base to identify the locations of unexploded munitions. "If the unexploded ordnance is deemed stable enough, the specialists will transport it to a safe location away from population for destruction," Thurmond said. "But if determined to be too unstable to move safely, it will be destroyed in place." The US experts will work for about two months on the disposal of the large amounts of munitions involved, the spokesman said, adding that after the ordnance disposal team had laid the groundwork, a civilian contractor with specialist knowledge of the assignment would be engaged to complete the job. "We cannot complete this work in two months. It is our intention to begin the mission and pass it on to a civilian contractor," he said. Other US and British bomb disposal experts have been in Nigeria since the first week of February, helping their Nigerian counterparts to identify and recover unexploded munitions. Nigerian authorities said 1,350 unexploded bombs, mortars and artillery pieces had been recovered so far. At least 1,000 people died in the disaster, according to official figures. Most of the victims were residents of the Oshodi-Isolo neighbourhood adjoining the military base, who drowned in a drainage canal while fleeing the explosions and the accompanying mortar shells and shrapnel that rained on the city.