No compensation for Jos chlorine gas disaster deaths, Lalong declares

By Hir Joseph, Jos | Publish Date: Jun 2 2016 5:00AM

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Governor Simon Lalong of Plateau State yesterday declared that the state will not pay compensations to relatives of the nine residents of Jos who were killed in a chlorine gas leak disaster last year. 
“Government was not supposed to pay compensation,” Lalong said through his Director of Media and Publicity, Emmanuel Nanle, in a text message in reaction to our inquiries about government’s treatment of families affected in the disaster. 

Nine persons were killed and over a hundred more, including pregnant women and children, were hospitalized after they inhaled excess chlorine gas that leaked into their sleeping quarters from cylinders wrongly placed in the stores of the state water treatment plant at British-America Junction, on July 25, 2015. 
Various committees, including one which was set up by the state government to investigate the cause of the disaster had indicted the state water board of negligence, but several months after, relatives of the deceased say the government has abandoned them.
“It has been silence. We have not had any communication from government since then. They came around and spoke to us during their investigations. But it has been silence since then,” Ikenna Ezennia, a man who lost a younger sister, Miss Joy, who he was training at the National Film Institute, said. Joy, 23, and her roommate, Miss Brenda Adebayo, 23, chocked to death from inhaling excess toxic from the leakage, Mr. Ezennia said, quoting reports from medical doctors. 
Also, Mrs. Nguemo Bigila, mother of a Masters’ degree student, Miss Sonia Bigila who was also found dead after she inhaled the toxic gas, told Daily Trust on phone that the government had not communicated the family over issues of compensation. “I picked the corpse of my daughter and buried it. I don’t know if compensations are coming. No one has told me anything,” Mrs. Bigila said. 
In place of compensation, the state government plans a ‘palliative’ measure. The governor’s media aide said, “Some form of palliative will be given to help the survivors in matters of relocation because the neighbourhood around the treatment plant has been put on notice.”