More than 150 killed in pipeline blast

More than 150 people were killed while scavenging fuel when a ruptured fuel pipeline exploded and caught fire near Nigeria’s biggest city of Lagos, police and health officials said. The pipeline, which transports fuel from a depot at the Lagos port for domestic use inland, was breached at several points at a beach on the Lagos Lagoon where fuel thieves siphoned the volatile liquid into plastic jerry cans. Inhabitants of poor fishing villages said they were awakened by a huge bang as the pipeline caught fire, scorching the crowds of scavengers. “We think that between 150 and 200 people were killed by the fire,” Lagos Police Commissioner Emmanuel Adebayo, told reporters at the scene. As burials took place on Saturday, President Olusegun Obasanjo said he was ordering an inquiry into the causes of the explosion. Public health workers and Nigerian Red Cross officials picking up bodies at the scene said they found no survivors when they arrived at the site, where bodies were scattered over a wide area. Scores of corpses burnt beyond recognition were buried in a mass grave dug by health workers at the site. Dozens more, most mere skeletons, lay charred around several ditches dug by the fuel thieves under the pipeline near the lagoon shore. Burnt and bloated bodies floated in surrounding water. “By this night most of the bodies will float, and it’s only then we can say exactly how many people died,” said Tola Kasali, Lagos State Health Commissioner, who led the team of public health officials recovering bodies at the site. “But it’s certainly hundreds.” Kasali said health workers were concentrating on moving bodies from the shore to “a temporary dump” further onshore to prevent them being washed through the lagoon water system into Lagos city. Some 35 bodies had been recovered in the water by Saturday noon. “By tomorrow we will dig a bigger ditch and bury them all,” he said. Pipelines fires caused by vandals stealing fuel are frequent in Nigeria and have claimed thousands of lives in the past decade. In the worst known case, more than 1,000 people died when they were enveloped by a pipeline inferno in 1998 while scooping fuel at Jesse, near the oil town of Warri in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil producer exporting 2.5 million barrels of crude daily, but more than 70 percent of the population subsists on less than US $1 daily. Most of the victims of these pipeline fires are usually the poor.