When the Air Turned Deadly

Name: When the Air Turned Deadly
Genre: Documentary

The story returns to August 1986, reconstructing the Nyos release from the human and animal evidence it left behind.

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Transcript

On August 21st, 1986, Lake Nyos released a cloud that could suffocate.
Lake Nyos filled a volcanic maar within the Cameroon Volcanic Line.
Large amounts of carbon dioxide had accumulated inside the lake.
Then the water released a carbon dioxide cloud: a limnic eruption.
This survivor represents the terror of an asphyxiant in open air. There's nothing to see. I can't catch my breath.
Breath is invisible, and so is the moment it disappears.
Clinical findings from 845 survivors matched exposure to an asphyxiant gas.
Across the disaster, about 1,700 people died from the deadly release.
The same event killed 3,500 domestic animals around Lake Nyos.
Then rescuers saw evidence that seemed to point somewhere else.
On an unknown share of bodies, they observed red skin and bullae.
Red skin is called erythema; fluid-filled blisters are bullae.
At first, those marks were believed to be burns from acidic gases.
A medical paper on the Lake Nyos disaster was published in BMJ in 1989.
Further investigation suggested the lesions accompanied comas caused by carbon dioxide exposure.
Still, the study did not exclude other toxic factors in the release.
I lost consciousness, then woke without knowing what had happened.

The carbon dioxide explained the suffocation—but the strange skin lesions looked like burns, and no one yet knew what had caused them.

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