Deadly Gas Sought Beneath African Lake

Convinced that another disaster lurks beneath Lake Nios, a team of experts begins a high-tech operation Friday to locate and eventually remove the deadly gas that emerged in 1986 to kill 1,746 villagers.

Using a remote-controlled mini-submarine, the experts from France and Cameroon will search the bottom of the lake with an underwater television camera and sophisticated data-collecting devices.

Data will be radioed to the team’s command post on shore, and also will be transmitted to interested research laboratories worldwide through a U.S. government weather satellite, the Ministry of Mines said.

The researchers hope the probe of the lake bottom’s geological formations will uncover the sources of the carbon dioxide that rose from the lake on Aug. 21, 1986, to suffocate victims as they slept in nearby villages. Two years earlier, on Aug. 15, 1984, a similar eruption of gas at neighboring Lake Monoun killed 45 people.

“Cameroon has declared, `Never again Nios, never again Monoun, never again anywhere in Cameroon,”’ Minister of Mines Bello Mbelle said at a news conference Wednesday.

The exploratory phase of the operation is scheduled to last at least one month. The team hopes its findings will suggest the best approach for a second phase - removing the trapped gas without releasing it into the atmosphere. Scientists estimated that 100 million cubic meters of toxic gas was released in the 1986 catastrophe and that about 250 million cubic meters remains.