Death toll rises to 60 in Nigeria pipeline inferno

In this story: Corpses litter the beach Blaze sparked by stove, resident says Rusting refineries cannot meet demand RELATED STORIES, SITES

LAGOS, Nigeria (Reuters) -- The death toll from an oil products pipeline fire that swept through a Nigerian fishing village near Lagos on Thursday has risen to more than 60, a local official said.

Many of those killed were fishermen in wooden boats engulfed in the flaming liquid.

"At least 60 people died in this needless fire," said Karimu Alabi, a senior official of the local government in the area.

The inferno occurred at Ebute-Oko, near a products depot owned by state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

Burned corpses litter the beach

More than a dozen burned bodies littered a beach at the village of Ebute-Oke, which faces the central business district of Lagos across a lagoon.

Residents said the fire started near the village at daybreak and spread rapidly along the line of the oil leak, ravaging a cluster of huts and wooden houses.

At about the same time, a second fire razed Makoko shantytown, where thousands of fishermen and their families live in wooden cabins erected on stilts in the lagoon near Lagos University.

Residents said fishermen from Makoko had been scooping up gasoline from the leaking pipeline for days and storing it in cans in the wooden huts. Many victims of the Ebute-Oke fire were from Makoko.

A Reuters photographer saw fishermen with burn injuries being ferried to Makoko in dugout canoes, only to find their homes gutted.

Blaze sparked by stove, resident says

Villagers in Ebute-Oke recounted the horror of the racing flames, which engulfed fishermen inside their canoes and women preparing to take fish to market.

"I helped to remove 15 bodies," said boat owner Isaac Oke, who joined the rescue effort.

One resident said the inferno was sparked by a wooden stove on which a woman was cooking in the open, close to where the leaking oil was spreading along the beach.

The disaster was the latest in a string of oil pipeline tragedies that have dogged oil-producing Nigeria over the past two years.

Most of them have been in the southern Niger Delta region, which accounts for most of Nigeria's crude production of more than 2 million barrels a day. Some fires have been caused by various accidents, others by the deliberate puncturing of products pipelines by gasoline thieves.

The last such blaze was on July 10, when at least 250 villagers scavenging fuel from a pipeline at Adeje, near Warri, died when the fuel exploded.

Rusting refineries cannot meet demand

Despite being Africa's top oil exporter, Nigeria faces acute shortages of refined products because its rusting refineries cannot meet local demand.

Filling stations in many parts of the country are currently empty, forcing motorists to turn to the thriving black market for supplies.

NNPC spokesman Ndu Ughamadu told Reuters the latest fire was likely to aggravate an acute fuel shortage in Lagos because operations at the Atlas Cove depot had been suspended following the blaze.

Scores feared dead in fiery Nigeria tanker crash
November 6, 2000
At least 100 dead in Nigerian gasoline pipeline explosion
July 12, 2000

Library of Congress Country Studies: Nigeria
Nigeria: Oil And Gas Industry: Overview
World Investment News - Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation

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