Truemors
The following is reprinted from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader: World of Odd.
Here’s the story of how scientists unlocked the secrets of the worst natural disaster in the history of the West African nation of Cameroon… and what they’re doing to try and stop it from happening again.
THE DISCOVERY
On the morning of August 22, 1986, a man hopped onto his bicycle and began riding from Wum, a village in Cameroon, towards the village of Nyos. On the way he noticed an antelope lying dead next to the road. Why let it go to waste? The man tied the antelope onto his bicycle and continued on. A short distance later he noticed two dead rats, and further on, a dead dog and other dead animals. He wondered if they’d all been killed by a lightening lightning strike – when lightening lightning hits the ground it’s not unusual for animals nearby to be killed by the shock.
Soon the man came upon a group of huts. He decided to see if anyone there knew what had happened to the animals. But as he walked up to the huts he was stunned to see dead bodies strewn everywhere. He didn’t find a single person still alive—everyone in the huts was dead. The man threw down his bicycle and ran all the way back to Wum.
By the time the man got back to the village,
the first survivors of whatever it was that had struck Nyos and other
nearby villages were already stumbling into Wum. Many told tales of hearing an explosion or rumbling
noise in the distance, then smelling strange smells and passing out for
as long as 36 hours before waking up to discover that everyone around
them was dead.
Wum
is in a remote part of Cameroon, so it took two days for a medical team
to arrive in the area after local officials called the governor to
report the strange occurrence. The doctors found a catastrophe far
greater than they could have imagined: Overnight, something had killed
nearly 1,800 people. Plus more than 3,000 cattle and countless wild
animals, birds and insects—in short every living creature for miles
around.
The official death toll was recorded as 1,746 people, but that was
only an estimate, because the survivors had already begun to bury
victims in mass graves, and many terrified survivors had fled
corpse-filled villages and were hiding in the forest. Whatever it was
that killed so many people seemed to have disappeared without a trace
just as quickly as it had come.
LOOKING FOR CLUES
What could have caused so many deaths in such a short span of time?
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