View of Cameroon Disaster : Gas Deaths Like ‘a Neutron Bomb’

A sign scrawled in English over the doorway of a two-room hut in this remote mountain village read, “Come in with Peace.”

Inside were a few sticks of furniture, a couple of tattered suitcases, and, hanging from nails on one concrete wall, four little girls’ dresses.

But there were no little girl sounds coming from the hut on Tuesday. The only noise came from a scrawny chicken clucking and scratching in an irregular plot of freshly turned earth in the yard.

“In this grave, I put eight yesterday,” said Lt. Gen. James Tataw, head of the Cameroon army’s disaster relief operation, nodding toward the plot. “The dresses that are there belong to no person now.”

Only Chicken Survived

“The goats, the pigs, the cows, the men--they all died,” Tataw said, almost as an afterthought. “Only that chicken survived. We don’t know how.”

Tataw was guiding the first group of journalists to reach this area since poisonous gas erupted from the bottom of nearby Lake Nios last Thursday night, enveloping neighboring farm villages in a cloud of toxic fumes now said to have claimed at least 1,500 and possibly as many as 2,000 lives in northwestern Cameroon.

The hillsides were still littered with the bloated carcasses of hundreds of long-horned cattle. The three villages hardest hit by the freak eruption--Nios, Cha and Souboum--were almost empty except for disaster relief workers and a handful of survivors and relatives there to bury their dead or reclaim a few belongings.

“It was as if a neutron bomb had exploded,” Father Fred Horn, a Roman Catholic priest whose mission is in the town of Wum, 31 miles from the lake, said after visiting the stricken area. There was no apparent damage, he noted, to houses or machinery or the lush green hills and heavy forests--only to human beings and animals--much like the effect of the high-radiation, low-blast neutron bomb that kills with minimal damage to property.

The toxic but still unidentified gas has apparently evaporated, so relief workers are no longer wearing gas masks. But troops wearing kerchiefs over their mouths and plugs in their noses to ward off the lingering smell of decaying bodies were still finding and burying victims Tuesday.

“They are being buried near the houses because there is no question of transportation and the state of some of the corpses makes them difficult to touch,” said Tataw. “We are using military equipment . . . and the grave is dug as near as possible to where the corpses are found so that I push them into the grave.”

No Formal Death Count

Tataw said the casualty toll is imprecise because relatives buried some of the dead, even before the relief workers arrived, while the army has buried others, with no actual count being kept. The latest estimate of more than 1,500 dead was reached by subtracting known survivors from the number of people believed to have lived in the villages before the disaster.

Moreover, the officer said, many homes away from the few dirt roads lacing the area have not been searched yet, even though he said it is virtually certain there are victims in many of them.

“My estimation is that there are well over 2,000 dead,” said Ngwang Gumne, provincial chief of service for the government’s Community Development Department.

Tataw admitted he is also worried about the danger of leaving rotting animal carcasses exposed. However, he shrugged, “We can only do the best we can. The cows have no relatives, so their burial will be the last thing.”

The waters of Lake Nios, usually a brilliant blue, have turned reddish-brown, apparently the color of the clay that was churned up from the bottom. Disaster investigator Francois Leguern of the French National Center for Scientific Research said that the red lake water was caused by particles of laterite mud, indicating that underwater volcanic activity may be continuing.

Leguern speculated that the disaster was caused by volcanic gas long trapped in the lake and released by an explosion deep down in the waters of the long-dormant crater. “The gas was heavier than the air, so those on low ground were the first victims,” he said.

Survivors in Souboum, five miles from the lake, and provincial government officials said that the gas eruption occurred last Thursday night rather than Friday as originally reported.

Gas Wafted Out

The toxic cloud wafted over the northern lip of Lake Nios--which fills the entire mouth of a volcano’s crater--and then spilled like the foam over the edge of a glass of beer, finally enveloping an area of about six square miles and killing with what sometimes seemed extraordinary caprice.

In the village of Nios, the settlement closest to the volcanic lake, the entire population of more than 1,000 was killed with the exception of one woman and a child. In the separate village of Upper Nios, on higher ground, there were no casualties.

In Souboum, according to a relief worker, “There may have been two people standing next to each other--one standing in the wind current was killed almost immediately while another a couple of feet away survived.”

Awoke, Gasped for Air

Dennis Chin, a 32-year-old Souboum tradesman, said he awoke from his sleep Thursday night and had trouble breathing. “I sat on my bed and breathed like this,” he said, pretending to gasp for air.

He said he went outside and, only partially conscious, crossed to an unventilated cooking room in the back of his neighbor’s house. He broke down the door of the room, which is normally locked at night to keep out animals, and crawled inside where he passed out. The tightly sealed room may have saved his life, he indicated.

Another Souboum survivor, Chia David Wambong, said, “The smell was like cooking with kitchen gas. Everyone seemed like they were drunk. Everybody started to cough and some people vomited blood.”

Wambong said he felt unusually warm, and when he heard his neighbors screaming and saw them falling to the ground, he ran back inside his home. He said he drank palm oil and credits that for his survival.

No Electricity, Phones

There are no electricity or telephones in these remote hills, and hundreds of thatched huts dot the landscape along with concrete and adobe structures. Word of the disaster was slow to reach more populous nearby centers because so many of the people here died.

Gideon Paka, provincial delegate for information and culture, said he first heard about it through a government worker who had been returning by motorcycle to his home in Nios from Wum, about 30 miles away.

The government employee found the body of a dead antelope along the road, thinking at first that “it was his lucky day,” said Paka. But farther on, he found human bodies, and he started coughing and feeling dizzy himself. He turned around and brought out word that something was desperately wrong.

Paka was one of the first outsiders to reach the affected villages, last Saturday. Arriving in Cha, about three miles west of Nios, “We met people who were freshly dying, and some who were dead,” he recalled. “Those who survived were coughing up blood,” and some of the corpses had blood stains around their mouths and noses.

Tore Off Their Clothes

“People were lying all over their yards,” Paka added. “Most were naked or half naked--they had torn their clothing off because of the heat.”

John Bangsi, who lives outside of Souboum, said he walked to the village last Friday morning and found “dead bodies lying all over.” At the home of an uncle, he said, only one out of 28 family members survived. “Some were lying outside, some under the bed, some on the bed,” he recalled.

The few survivors were evacuated after the leak, and Radio Cameroon said the government was trying to find homes for them. But many were close to despair.

“It makes no difference where I live,” mourned Wambong, whose two children were killed by the lethal cloud. “All my family is dead, and my wife is in the hospital. Where can I go?”

Meanwhile, outside aid began to reach the provincial capital at Bamenda on Tuesday. A U.S.-made C-130 aircraft of the Cameroon army arrived with 16 tons of canned rations for displaced villagers. In a local version of a bucket brigade, scores of school-age children lined up behind the huge plane and unloaded the rations, one tin at a time.

Another shipment contained hundreds of five-gallon plastic containers of lime for contaminated animal carcasses.

Some Injuries Minor

The head of an Israeli army medical team that arrived here Monday morning to aid in relief efforts said that those people injured in the disaster are apparently not hurt as seriously as feared.

“It appears that those who did survive were minimally affected, at least up to now,” said Dr. Michael Wiener, an army colonel. “We know of some burns, some lung problems, and various minor trauma.”

Community development official Gumne said the injured are being treated at two hospitals, in Nkambe and Wum. Of 300 people originally hospitalized at Nkambe, he added, 120 have already been released. About 100 more are being treated at Wum.

However, said Wiener, in addition to the danger of epidemic from the rotting animal carcasses still exposed in the area, there is another health concern.

He said that some people who ingested too small an amount of poisonous gas to show immediate symptoms remain in danger of what he called “a chemical inflammation of the lungs which can lead to pneumonia.” He said some such cases are “already appearing,” and added, “I suppose this is what we will be confronted with, mainly.”

Wiener said that the toxic fumes released from the bottom of the volcanic lake Thursday night apparently consisted of a number of acid gases as well as carbon dioxide, though the precise nature of the mixture is unclear. He said that when ingested in large amounts, the gases would cause asphyxiation. For most victims, loss of consciousness came in seconds, death within a few minutes, he said.