Isu Hangat: The Strangest Disaster of the 20th Century

Here's the story of how scientists unlocked the secrets of the worst natural disaster in the history of the West African nation of Cameroon… and what they're doing to try and stop it from happening again.

THE DISCOVERY

On the morning of August 22, 1986, a man hopped onto his bicycle and began riding from Wum, a village in Cameroon, towards the village of Nyos. On the way he noticed an antelope lying dead next to the road. Why let it go to waste? The man tied the antelope onto his bicycle and continued on. A short distance later he noticed two dead rats, and further on, a dead dog and other dead animals. He wondered if they'd all been killed by a lightening strike – when lightening hits the ground it's not unusual for animals nearby to be killed by the shock.

Soon the man came upon a group of huts. He decided to see if anyone there knew what had happened to the animals. But as he walked up to the huts he was stunned to see dead bodies strewn everywhere. He didn't find a single person still alive—everyone in the huts was dead. The man threw down his bicycle and ran all the way back to Wum.

SOMETHING BIG

Nyos village, where nearly 2,000 people were killed (Image Credit: Jack Lockwood)

By the time the man got back to the village, the first survivors of whatever it was that had struck Nyos and other nearby villages were already stumbling into Wum. Many told tales of hearing an explosion or rumbling noise in the distance, then smelling strange smells and passing out for as long as 36 hours before waking up to discover that everyone around them was dead.

Wum is in a remote part of Cameroon, so it took two days for a medical team to arrive in the area after local officials called the governor to report the strange occurrence. The doctors found a catastrophe far greater than they could have imagined: Overnight, something had killed nearly 1,800 people. Plus more than 3,000 cattle and countless wild animals, birds and insects—in short every living creature for miles around.

The official death toll was recorded as 1,746 people, but that was only an estimate, because the survivors had already begun to bury victims in mass graves, and many terrified survivors had fled corpse-filled villages and were hiding in the forest. Whatever it was that killed so many people seemed to have disappeared without a trace just as quickly as it had come.

LOOKING FOR CLUES

What could have caused so many deaths in such a short span of time? When word of the disaster reached the outside world, scientists from France (Cameroon is a former French colony), the United States, and other countries arrived to help the country's own scientists figure out what had happened. The remains if the victims offered few clues. There was no evidence of bleeding, physical trauma, or disease, and no sign of exposure to radiation, chemical weapons, or poison gas. And there was no evidence of suffering or "death agony": The victims apparently just blacked out, fell over, and died.

One of the first important clues was the distribution of the victims across the landscape: The deaths had all occurred within about 12 miles of Lake Nyos, which some local tribes called the "bad lake." Legend had that long ago, evil spirits had risen out of the lake and killed all the people living in a village at the water's edge.

Both the number of victims and the presence of fatalities increased as the scientists got closer to the lake: In the outlying villages many people, especially those who had remained inside their homes, had survived, while in Nyos, which is less than two miles away was the closest village to the lake, only 6 of more than 800 villagers were still alive.

But it was the lake itself that provided the biggest and strangest clue of all: its normally clear blue waters has turned a deep, murky red. The scientists began to wonder if there was more to the legend of the "bad lake" than anyone had realized.

STILL LIFE

Lake Nyos is roughly one square mile in surface area and has a maximum depth of 690 feet. It's what's known as a "crater lake"—it formed when the crater of a long-extinct volcano filled with water. But was the volcano really extinct? Maybe an eruption was the culprit: Maybe the volcano beneath the lake had come back to life and in the process suddenly released enough poison gas to kill every living creature over a very wide area.

The theory was compelling but problematic: An eruption capable of releasing enough poison gas to kill that many people over that wide an area would have been very violent and accompanied by plenty of seismic activity. None of the eyewitnesses had mentioned earthquakes, and when the scientists checked with seismic recording station 140 miles away, it showed no evidence of unusual activity on the evening of August 21. This was backed up by the fact that even in the hardest-hit villages, goods were still piled high on shelves in homes where every member of the house-hold had been killed. And the scientists noticed another mysterious clue: The oil lamps in these homes had all been extinguished even the ones still filled with plenty of oil.

TESTING THE WATERS

The scientists began to test water samples taken from various depths in the lake. The red on the surface turned out to be dissolved iron—normally found on the bottom of the lake, not the top. Somehow the sediment at the bottom had been stirred up and the iron brought to the surface, where it turned the color of rust after coming into contact with oxygen.

The scientists also discovered unusually high levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) dissolved or "in solution" in the water. Samples from a as shallow as 50 feet deep contained so much CO ₂ that when they were pulled to the surface, where the water pressure was lower, the dissolved CO₂ came bubbling out of solution—just as if someone had unscrewed the cap on a bottle of soda.

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