Bonga Spill: Experts Fault Shell’s Claims

Environmentalists and fishermen have faulted claims by Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC) over the recent spill from its Bonga oil facility. Bonga field is located about 120kms off the Nigerian coastline.

The Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), an NGO, says that the spills from Bonga fields had reached the coastline in Odioama Community, Brass Local Government Area of Bayelsa.

The ERA/FoEN Executive Director, Mr Nnimo Bassey, said in a statement on Wednesday that environmental monitors from the organisation had visited the impacted site.

Bassey said that the team sighted oil deposits on the shoreline and advised the Federal Government to conduct an independent investigation to ascertain the volume of oil that spilled and compel the SPDC to pay adequate compensation to the affected communities.

Fishermen had on December 23, reported sighting crude oil on the Atlantic waters near the coastline. Earlier on December 21, the SPDC had announced that 40,000 barrels of crude leaked into the Atlantic Ocean from its Bonga deep offshore oil fields and subsequently shut down the facility. Later in a statement in Eket, Wednesday, SPDC claimed that the spill had been contained.

The statement, signed by the company’s spokesman, Mr Precious Okolobo, however, claimed that another spill from a yet to be ascertained source, had sabotaged its clean-up activities. It said that remnants of the crude oil that leaked from Bonga had dispersed.

“The oil from Bonga had largely dispersed. However, around the same time as our efforts to clean up the Bonga oil offshore were coming to a successful conclusion, we noticed a clear trail of oil that we believed, could not have been from Bonga,” he said.

Chairman of Ogu/Bolo LGA, Dame Mureen Tamuno chatting with her Okrika LGA counterpart, Barr Tamuno Williams, at a function in Port Harcourt, recently.