On the night of August 21st, 1986, approximately 1,746 people, as well as 3,500 animals suffocated over a radius of 25 kilometers around Lake Nyos, located in Cameroon. Most of them died in their sleep.
Lake Nyos, dubbed “The Deadliest Lake” by Guinness World Records in
2008, is one of the three ‘exploding lakes’ on this planet. Beneath its
beautiful surface, dangerously high concentrations of carbon dioxide
(CO2) seep into its waters from a pocket of volcanic magma deep below
the lake bed, changing it into carbonic acid.
On a day which later would be called “The Lake Nyos Disaster”,
something, possibly a landslide, triggered the release of approximately
100,000 – 300,000 tons of CO2. A thick cloud of toxic gas spread up to
15 miles from the lake, suffocating thousands of the people sleeping in
the nearby villages of Nyos, Kam, Cha and Subum.
The following excerpt is from a survivor’s report by Joseph Nkwain,
who described the situation when woke up after the cloud had passed:
“I could not speak. I became unconscious. I could not
open my mouth because then I smelled something terrible … I heard my
daughter snoring in a terrible way, very abnormal … When crossing to my
daughter’s bed … I collapsed and fell. […] … I was surprised to see that
my trousers were red, had some stains like honey. I saw some … starchy
mess on my body. My arms had some wounds … I didn’t really know how I
got these wounds …I opened the door … I wanted to speak, my breath would
not come out … My daughter was already dead … I went into my daughter’s
bed, thinking that she was still sleeping. I slept till it was 4:30
p.m. in the afternoon … on Friday. (Then) I managed to go over to my
neighbors’ houses. They were all dead … I decided to leave … . (because)
most of my family was in Wum … I got my motorcycle … A friend whose
father had died left with me (for) Wum … As I rode … through Nyos I
didn’t see any sign of any living thing.”
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