During the night of August 20, the Probo Koala, a tanker built in 1989 and owned by the Celtic Legend Shipping Inc., docked at the harbor of Abidjan. Its cargo – a volatile, toxic blend of a petroleum distillate and hydrogen sulphide was unloaded its onto 13 tanker trucks. Under cover of the night, these trucks proceeded to dump the noxious, dangerous cargo at several places around this city of over 3.6 Million. Now hundreds of residents have been poisoned and many are critically ill.

The Abidjan local daily Patriote suggests that local officials may be implicated in this scandal, and that they may have been paid off by whoever is responsible for this horrible crime. Clearly, they had to have had some local help to be able to unload and dump more than 500 cubic meters of this toxic brew.

The thing about this that gets me more than a few local officials taking bribes, is the gall of some chemical industry plant managers or executives somewhere, deciding to dump this stuff into the sewers of a city in Africa!!!
“Yeah buddy, we got a tanker load of this shit, whaddo we do with it?” – “Oh, ya know, let’s just ship it to Africa and dump it into the sewers of some city there … no one will notice … “

And they thought that that is a good idea, and that they would get away with it?

I hope the cops, Interpol, or the WHO …. someone is going to find out who is behind this and make them explain why they did this to the parents of the 10-year-old kid who is now in a coma because of this terrible crime. Right?

(I’ll post more stories to del.icio.us/yovo/toxic_waste)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Just plain nuts, Palmwine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.