An investigation into the mysterious gas that has repeatedly sickened students at schools in Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State, has pointed to methane as the likely culprit. As discussed on Channels Television, experts working on the case explained that what began as an unexplained smell forcing pupils out of their classrooms has now been traced, through detailed monitoring, to a gas that strips oxygen from the surrounding air.
According to the investigators, medical examinations of those affected showed that the gas was not an industrial one but rather a substance that depleted oxygen from the students and anyone else around the area. Suspicion quickly fell on methane, a gas known for its appetite for oxygen, alongside related compounds such as sulphides, which could explain the breathing difficulties and discomfort reported during the incidents.
Because Ijebu-Ode is not an industrial area, the kind of gas monitoring devices usually deployed in industrial zones were not already in place, which made early detection difficult. The releases were described as spontaneous and short-lived, so by the time analysers were brought in after the first cases, the gas had already dissipated and nothing could be picked up at that point.
The breakthrough came after the experts installed gas monitoring devices at the affected school and around the town. When the incident happened again, the instruments finally captured the gas, with methane values shooting up to around 15,000 parts per million. That reading confirmed to the team that something was seriously wrong and that methane was indeed present in dangerous concentrations.
With the gas identified, attention turned to where it was coming from. The experts narrowed the possible sources to two: either a trunk line or pipeline carrying methane for energy use, or the earth itself, for instance peat and other buried organic matter that can ooze methane over many years. Both possibilities had to be carefully examined before any firm conclusion could be reached about the origin of the leaks.
The scale of the problem also widened over time. While the first occurrence affected only one school, a later episode struck about three schools at the same time, around 7:40 in the morning, among them Anglican Girls Grammar School and other secondary schools in the area. Given the pattern, the possibility of sabotage was taken seriously, and the police, the Department of State Services and the Amotekun corps were all brought into the investigation, though no act of sabotage could be traced.
A gas pipeline running from Osossa to an industry was examined as well, but it was found to pass about five kilometres away along the expressway rather than through the town, and shutting it down did not establish a link. The decisive clue, according to the experts, was that all of the affected schools were connected by a single geological fault line in the earth's crust, in an area made up of a mixture of sedimentary formations, strengthening the case for a natural underground source of the methane.