The Director-General of National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency,NOSDRA, Idris Musa on Wednesday explained why the Nembe Oil Spill has not been contained three weeks after it occurred.
Musa gave the explanation during a live television interview monitored by Metro Network News in Abuja.
He said the delay was due to the process of contacting international companies to come and help contain the spill.
He further said when the spill happened on November 1, some Nigerian engineers working in oil companies were deployed to the site to contain the spill but it later dawned on them that the spill was not what they could contain.
” The MD of the company and I had a number of discussions and it then dawned on everybody that this is not what the Nigerian engineers working in the oil companies can contain and they had a recourse to contacting international companies to come and help. That took some processes as a matter of fact and those processes caused the delay”.
The Director-General, however, said the shut down operation of the well head would begin today.
” The MD confirmed to me yesterday that the well head experts who came in about a week ago to do aerial survey and went back are now back and will commence the shutdown operation of the well head today”.
Musa pointed out that it was after the operation that the joint investigation visit, continuation of recovery of spill oil and clean up of the area would take place.
He used the opportunity to correct the impression that the agency has not been doing anything.
” Let me correct the impression that NOSDRA has not been doing anything. I must say that when this spill happened and it was reported, we have been on this matter right from the onset. Some people were on site to get to the source of the spill but it was not like any other spill we’ve had before. This spill is similar to what had happened around Kulama when we had a gas blow out. But when they got to the well, it wasn’t accessible. And then, the owners of the asset were informed because of the way the oil and gas were spewing out. The first response strategy we had was to direct the oil company to boom the area. And booming the area will be the first effort at containment. As a matter of fact, it didn’t take the oil company much time to deploy the contractor that was making the recovery and on daily basis we have our officials monitoring and ensuring that the recovery effort is on a top gear. We also had to be taking record of the quantity of oil that is recovered”.
While noting that only 4,105 barrels of crude oil have been recovered so far, the DG dismissed the report that over 200, 000 barrels of crude oil had been spilled into the environment since the day that the incidence occurred.
