The National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) has said that 1,086 oil spills were recorded in Bayelsa State alone from 2015 to February 2022.
The Director-General, NOSDRA, Idris Musa, said this known when delegations from Connected Development (CODE) and OXFAM paid an advocacy visit to his office in Abuja on Wednesday.
According to him, out of the 1,086 oil spill incidents recorded in Bayelsa, 917 were as a result of sabotage in the form of third-party breakage of pipelines with hacksaw or outright blowing up of the pipelines.
While lamenting that Nigeria loses billions of naira because of the oil spillage experienced on a daily basis, he said communities in the area must protect oil installations and tackle such vandals, as their silence was causing harm to their environment.
“We cannot keep running away, we recorded 1, 086 oil spill in Bayelsa from 2015 to February 2022, that is 84.4 per cent; that means we need to do something. It is not about experts.”
“If I came from a community for instance, and then an expert will come and aid me to break a pipeline in my community that will spill oil into my water, will I then drink it and do other domestic chores?
“We need to speak to these issues, we have done that consistently with evidence; what we call Disaster Risk Reduction programme for communities, telling them why they do not need to vandalise oil facilities.
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