Rivers explosion: Evacuate bodies, residents beg FG

TRACKING >>Residents of Kom Kom community in Oyigbo Local Government of Rivers State have appealed to the authorities to help them evacuate bodies of some of victims of an explosion.
Three days after the explosion, residents complained of a lack of a coordinated effort by the authorities to help recover the bodies of some of the victims who are in the water, despite relatives and friends recovering some bodies.
Some of the residents said that unrecovered bodies could spell doom for Kom Kom community if the bodies remained in the water.
One of the residents, who gave his name as Innocent Echemba, said that only engineers from an unnamed oil company came to the site after shutting down supply to the affected pipeline.
Echemba regretted that despite the magnitude of the casualty, the Federal Government had not sent in divers to bring out bodies.
He said: “It shows that the residents of Kom Kom don’t matter to the authorities. They should send people down here to really find out the number of persons that perished in this disaster. They are saying that 50, 60 and even 100 people died.
“The figure should read 200 because the entire swamp was a market on Saturday morning before the explosion. The relatives of some of the victims are afraid and ashamed of what has happened. That is why there is silence.”
Another resident, who spoke to journalists at the railway line that directly leads to the explosion site, also disclosed that among the victims were a couple, a pregnant woman, two brothers of the same parents.
He said: “Yesterday (Sunday), we saw some of these corpses when they were rescued from the swamp, some we could no longer figure out their face, the smoke of the fire masked them all over with black charcoal. Over 42 were recovered from the mud yesterday (Sunday) but the majority of them are yet to be recovered.
“This place before the explosion Saturday was like a market place, several people were here struggling to scoop the product from the swamp.”