The oil-polluted waters of Bodo Creek in Nigeria. Photo: Jane Hahn/The New York Times

BIG oil spills are no longer news in the Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface. This once-verdant area has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates. The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are lifeless.

Perhaps no place on earth has been as battered by oil, experts say, leaving residents here astonished at the non-stop attention paid to the gusher half a world away in the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a few weeks ago, they say, that a burst pipe, belonging to Shell, was finally shut after flowing for two months. Now nothing living moves in a black-and-brown world once teeming with shrimp and crab.

Not far away, there is still black crude on Gio Creek from an April spill, and just across the state line in Akwa Ibom the fishermen curse their oil-blackened nets, doubly useless in a barren sea buffeted by a spill from an offshore Exxon Mobil pipe in May that lasted for weeks.

Hannah Baage in the oil-polluted Gio Creek in Kegbara Dere, Nigeria. Photo: Jane Hahn/The New York Times

The oil spews from rusted and ageing pipes, unchecked by what analysts say is ineffectual or collusive regulation, and abetted by deficient maintenance and sabotage. In the face of this black tide is an infrequent protest - soldiers guarding an Exxon Mobil facility beat women who were demonstrating last month, according to witnesses - but mostly resentful resignation.

Small children swim in the polluted estuary here, fishermen take their skiffs out ever further - ''There's nothing we can catch here,'' said Pius Doron, perched anxiously over his boat - and market women trudge through oily streams.

''There is Shell oil on my body,'' said Hannah Baage, emerging from Gio Creek with a machete to cut the cassava stalks balanced on her head.

That the Gulf of Mexico disaster has transfixed a country and president they so admire is a matter of wonder for people here, living among the palm-fringed estuaries in conditions as abject as any in Nigeria, according to the United Nations. Although their region contributes nearly 80 per cent of the government's revenue, they have hardly benefited from it; life expectancy is the lowest in Nigeria.

''President Obama is worried about that one,'' Claytus Kanyie, a local official, said of the Gulf spill, standing among dead mangroves in the soft oily muck outside Bodo. ''Nobody is worried about this one.''

In the distance, smoke rose from what Mr Kanyie and environmental activists said was an illegal refining business run by local oil thieves and protected, they said, by Nigerian security forces.

The Niger Delta has suddenly become a cautionary tale for the US. As many as 546 million gallons of oil spilled into the Niger Delta over the past five decades, or nearly 11 million gallons a year, a team of experts for the Nigerian government and international and local environmental groups concluded in a 2006 report. By comparison, the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 dumped an estimated 10.8 million gallons of oil into the waters off Alaska.

The spills here are all the more devastating because this ecologically sensitive wetland region, the source of 10 per cent of US oil imports, has most of Africa's mangroves and, like the Louisiana coast, has fed the interior for generations with its abundance of fish and crops.

Local environmentalists have been denouncing the spoliation for years, with little effect. ''It's a dead environment,'' said Patrick Naagbanton of the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development in Port Harcourt, the leading city of the oil region.

Environmentalists say that with intensive restoration the Niger Delta could again be what it once was. Nigeria produced more than 2 million barrels of oil a day last year, and in more than 50 years thousands of miles of pipes have been laid through the swamps.

How much of the spillage is caused by oil thieves or sabotage linked to the militant movement active in the Niger Delta, and how much stems from poorly maintained and ageing pipes, is a matter of fierce dispute among communities, environmentalists and the oil companies.

Caroline Wittgen, a spokeswoman for Shell in Lagos, said: ''We don't discuss individual spills.'' But she argued that the ''vast majority'' were caused by sabotage or theft, with only 2 per cent due to equipment failure or human error.

''We do not believe that we behave irresponsibly, but we do operate in a unique environment where security and lawlessness are major problems,'' Ms Wittgen said.

Oil companies also contend that they clean up much of what is lost. A spokesman for Exxon Mobil in Lagos, Nigel Cookey-Gam, said the company's recent offshore spill leaked only about 8400 gallons and that ''this was effectively cleaned up.''

But Richard Steiner, a consultant on oil spills, concluded in a 2008 report that historically ''the pipeline failure rate in Nigeria is many times that found elsewhere in the world''.

And he noted ''almost every year'' a spill can be linked to a corroded pipeline.

NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.theage.com.au/world/large-oil-spills-are-old-news-in-the...