At least 20 people were reportedly injured and several houses damaged by fire on Thursday evening when a gas pipeline exploded in Aleto community, in Eleme Local Government Area of Rivers State. The blast, reported at about 5 p.m. along Old Bori Road, was blamed on a ruptured line said to belong to the Nigeria Gas Company, and an eyewitness alleged that the pipeline had been leaking for roughly three weeks before it went up. None of those claims had been confirmed by the operator or by government agencies at the time of reporting.
The injured were rushed to hospitals, according to accounts from the scene, though the number of hospitals and the condition of individual victims were not given. Fire reached a cluster of commercial properties beside the road: market stalls, a mechanic workshop and the vehicles parked inside the workshop were among the property destroyed or damaged. The eyewitness said many of the casualties were passers-by and people doing business near the pipeline.
The central allegation is about warning. The eyewitness said community leaders had raised the alarm over the leak and that no adequate measures followed. Daniel Chuma, the Leader of the Eleme Legislative Council, who visited the site, gave an account that supports part of that claim while leaving a gap. Chuma said the council had earlier written to the company over a reported leak and petitioned the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, NOSDRA, and the Rivers State Ministry of Environment, copying the police, and that the council had asked for a joint investigation. He said, “We don’t know what they did before they left.”
The gap is the location. Chuma described the earlier leak as being on another section of the Nigeria Gas Company’s line, then said the explosion was on the same company’s pipeline, while the eyewitness spoke of a leak on this pipeline itself. The two accounts do not establish that the section that ruptured on Thursday is the section the council complained about, and neither the company nor NOSDRA had stated which section failed or when any leak was reported. The Eastern Updates found no statement from the Nigeria Gas Company, NOSDRA or the Rivers State police in the material available at filing.
Chuma also said no company representative had reached the scene by the time he spoke. Residents did what authorities had not yet done: community members cordoned the affected area with caution tape and told people to stay away. The council leader said they did so to avoid further danger.
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The Youths and Environmental Advocacy Centre, YEAC-Nigeria, issued a statement calling for urgent intervention by the Rivers State and federal governments and the relevant environmental agencies. Its executive director, Fyneface Fyneface, said surrounding buildings were affected and some residents hospitalized. The group was careful about what it could not say. It said it had not independently confirmed any fatalities, and it described the cause of the explosion as unverified. It asked NOSDRA to identify the operator of the facility and conduct a Joint Investigation Visit, the multi-party site inspection regulators use in Nigeria to establish the circumstances of a spill or pipeline incident. YEAC-Nigeria also urged that relevant provisions of the Petroleum Industry Act 2021 be applied where appropriate.
Eleme sits at the center of Nigeria’s southern energy infrastructure. The local government area hosts the Port Harcourt refinery complex, and Rivers is an oil-producing state crossed by pipelines carrying crude, refined products and gas. Ownership of a ruptured line has been contested before in the state.
The record in Rivers shows the pattern. A gas pipeline explosion in Elibrada, in Emohua Local Government Area, on January 6, 2021, drove residents of Elibrada and Oduoha from their communities, and Nigeria LNG said weeks afterward that it was not the operator of the affected line, even though the host community believed it could have been Nigeria LNG or the Nigerian Agip Oil Company. In June 2019, at least eight people died in a pipeline explosion in Oyigbo, in a line that a local official said belonged to the Pipeline Products Marketing Company; police said engineers were carrying out maintenance work on the line when it blew.
Elsewhere in Nigeria this year, a gas explosion in Calabar on March 21 injured dozens at a private petrol and gas facility on Edibe Edibe Road. Cross River State’s health commissioner put the number of affected people at 60, and police said a hose detached while an attendant was transferring gas from a storage tank, releasing fumes into a densely populated neighborhood. Governor Bassey Otu said at the scene that such a facility should not sit in a residential area, and he ordered free treatment for victims.
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In Aleto, the questions are narrower and more immediate: who operated the line, when the leak was first reported, and what the operator did after it was reported. The Joint Investigation Visit that YEAC-Nigeria wants is the mechanism through which those questions would be put to the operator at the site.
YEAC-Nigeria said it had not independently confirmed any fatalities and that the cause of the explosion remained unverified.
The Eastern Updates
