The strange Lake Nyos CO2 Gas Disaster: Impacts and the displacement and return of affected communities

At about 9 p. m. on Thursday 21 August 1986 in Cameroon an enormous volume of carbon dioxide (CO2) gas was released from Lake Nyos, a volcanic crater lake in Cameroon. The gas flowed down towards nearby settlements and killed approximately 1,800 people, 3000 cattle, and countless wild animals, birds and insects - in short almost every living creature for miles around. The official human death toll was only an estimate, the reason being that before competent authorities who collected statistics on the mortality rate could reach the disaster area, some survivors had already begun to bury victims in mass graves, and many terrified survivors had even fled corpse-filled villages and hid themselves in the forest. The impact of this event resulted in the massive involuntary resettlement of people from nearby settlements. The villages that were most affected by the disaster included Cha, Subum and Nyos, situated in Fungom periphery in the North West Region (previously North West Province) of Cameroon. It took two days for a medical team to arrive the lake site after local officials had called the Governor of the Northwest Region to report the strange occurrence. When the doctors and other medical personnel arrived at the lake, they found an unthinkable catastrophe and a fatal disaster far greater than they could have imagined. This article sets out to decipher and unravel the origins of the disaster, its far-reaching effects and how it led to forced human migration and massive involuntary resettlement in the region. © 2011. Forka Leypey Mathew Fomine.