Investigators looking into a series of mysterious gas emissions that disrupted several schools in the Ijebu area of Ogun State say the episodes appear to be linked to a geological fault line running beneath the affected sites, Channels Television reported. The releases puzzled residents and officials for days because they were spontaneous and short lived, making them hard to detect and even harder to explain.
The first episode affected a single school, and by the time experts arrived with a gas analyzer the release had already dissipated, leaving them with nothing to measure. According to the account, the gas was a short lived emission that came and went within a few minutes, which is why the early efforts to capture and identify it came up empty and deepened the mystery around what was happening.
The breakthrough on the readings came during a later episode, when the gas was still present as the team carried out its checks. At that point the analyzers recorded methane levels of around 15,000 parts per million, a figure that told investigators something was clearly wrong and turned their attention to where such a volume of methane could be coming from.
The second wave was wider than the first. About three more schools were hit at the same time, at around 7:40 in the morning, and in total four schools in the area were affected by the emissions. The fact that several sites were involved at once pushed the investigators to look for a common thread that could connect all of them.
The inquiry weighed two main possibilities for the source of the methane. One was a gas pipeline, after it emerged that gas was being supplied from Ososa to an industry, although that line ran along the expressway several kilometres away and did not pass through the affected community. The other was the earth itself, including the slow release of gas from buried, decomposing organic matter over many years.
Because the emissions raised fears of foul play, the security agencies were brought in. The state commissioner of police was involved, along with the DSS, as the team examined whether the releases could have been a deliberate or targeted act. After their checks, however, the investigators said they could not trace any sign of sabotage behind the incidents.
The key clue, according to the account, was what linked the schools together. The four affected sites were found to lie on the same fault line in the earth's crust, in an area whose geology is a mixture of sedimentary and basement rock. As a precaution the nearby gas supply was shut down, even though investigators were not able to tie the pipeline directly to what the schools experienced.