Residents of Dankam community and other areas adjoining the troubled Jos water treatment plant where 11 persons died from inhaling a poisonous gas leakage are returning to the same area after they had evacuated to safer places, Daily Trust can report.
Residents living or doing businesses near the Plateau State Water Board in the state capital, had evacuated the area the same day of July 25, after the accident killed many and left over a hundred injured.
Also, personnel of the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS), whose quarters share a fence with the troubled plant have returned there, barely a week after the official quarters suffered casualties from the leakage, Daily Trust observed.
At least 11 persons were confirmed dead after they inhaled the toxic substance from what was later learnt to be expired chlorine cylinders at the plant. About 101 others were also confirmed injured following a leak of the liquid chlorine at the treatment plant which is tucked in-between residential quarters and business places along the busy Bukuru By-Pass in British America area of Jos.
But Daily Trust observed that residents are returning to their quarters, as business places near the plant have reopened.
“We have nowhere to go to. What do we do, sleep in the streets. We had to return because there was no provision made for us to remain outside of our home,” Mrs. Kangyan Paul, a pregnant woman told Daily Trust at an apartment sharing fence with the plant.
The mother of a toddler, who is living there with her husband and child, said the family returned there after a week, in the hope that the poisonous gas leakage would have been long controlled.
“We are hoping the government will make provisions for our relocation if they feel this place is not safe for us to return. But we have heard from no one in official quarters,” the pregnant woman said. She said she was lucky to escape the gas leakage with her family in an area where neighbours died in a large number, but expressed fears that her unborn baby may have been affected.
Meanwhile, the management of the plant has long resumed treatment of water there with powdered chlorine.
But investigation by a team of specialists, earlier on Monday, showed that the plant is still keeping the stockpile of the poisonous substance in the same expired cylinders at the plant.
Professor Abdulsalami Nasidi, Project Manager of Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), who led a team of doctors from the Nigeria Field Epidemiology and Laboratory Training Program (NFELTP), had said during the inspection at the plant that the source of the poison was yet to be addressed, insisting that it needed to be moved out immediately and buried to stave off a reoccurrence of the tragedy.
