(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Niger Delta Negligence [1]

[]

Date: 2018-03-16 12:55:00+00:00

A life-changing victory

In 2008 and 2009, two massive oil spills in the fishing town of Bodo had a catastrophic impact. Thick black oil leaked into rivers and creeks for weeks, killing fish and robbing people of their livelihoods. Shell, the operator of the leaking pipelines, repeatedly understated the volume of oil spilled – and offered the community only a paltry amount of compensation ($4000).

With the help of Amnesty International, the Bodo community took legal action. Shell admitted it had made false statements about the size of the spills and settled out of court, paying the community £55 million in compensation.

We wanted to help other communities get justice too, but we knew we couldn’t trust the oil companies’ version of events. We needed to look through all the spill reports provided by oil companies and compare them with pictures of the pipelines, to understand what was really happening in the Niger Delta.

But we had a problem: there were thousands of documents and images, far too many even for Amnesty’s dedicated researchers to look through.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/niger-delta-oil-spills-decoders/

Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.