Thirty-seven die inhaling fumes while tapping a product line at Okrika jetty

At least 37 people died after midnight on 3 September at Okari Jetty in Okrika Local Government Area of Rivers State after inhaling fumes from a petroleum product they were loading into wooden boats. Police spokesperson ASP Agabe Blessing Karbalo confirmed the incident and said the dead were allegedly trying to steal crude. Dr Fyneface Dumnamene Fyneface, executive director of the Youths and Environmental Advocacy Centre, said volunteers in the Niger Delta reported 37 confirmed deaths from what residents call "Indorama fuel." Community sources told local reporters the toll could be 43, with 37 identified as Okrika indigenes and six unnamed. Bodies were seen in the river. Some people who made it off the boats were taken to hospital with breathing trouble. Others are still missing.

The sequence, as reconstructed by YEAC and community accounts, is specific. A vessel was at the jetty loading product for export, a run that happens about every two weeks. More than 100 people, some accounts say more than 200, arrived in locally made boats from Okrika and nearby communities. They connected a pipe to an illegal tapping point on a line that carries product from Indorama Eleme Petrochemical through the Port Harcourt refinery corridor to waiting ships. The product came off at high pressure. People collapsed. Some fell into the water and drowned.

Illegal bunkering is not a secret trade on this stretch of the Bonny river system. It is a parallel economy that sits beside licensed loading. The danger on 3 September was not an explosion, which is the usual headline in this region. It was the vapour itself. High-pressure light ends in a confined cluster of open boats will knock people down before a spark has time to matter. That is why the death list grew in the dark and why recovery is now a river problem as well as a crime scene.

Nigeria's state oil company, in a separate note this week, said the Obiafu-Obrikom-Oben gas pipeline is ready for first gas and that the Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano line is 95 percent complete. Those are the official pipes. The unofficial ones are the taps that communities cut into product lines because the licensed economy does not hire the men in the wooden boats. When a tap and a legal loading happen at the same jetty at the same hour, the pressure in the line does not distinguish between a ship's manifold and a hose over a canoe.

Okrika has lived with this bargain for decades. The confirmed number, 37, is the police and advocacy-group floor. The community number, 43 and rising, is the one families will bury. The state now has a choice it has faced before: treat the dead as thieves and close the file, or treat the jetty as a place where a legal export operation and an illegal tap shared a pipe, and ask who watched the line.

For now the facts that can be checked are the time, the place, the product nickname, the presence of a loading vessel, and a death count that has not finished moving. The river still holds people the list has not named.