Spilled crude lays waste to forest John Vidal Thursday September 16, 1999 To reach the Shell oil spill near the village of Otuegwe 1, you must swim through swamp forest after a five-mile tramp through cassava plantations. You smell it first, the stench of garage forecourts and rotting vegetation. The flooded land above the oil pipeline is the site of what may be one of the the worst spills in the Niger delta for years. Hundreds of hectares of forest are dead. Pools of crude oil stretch in every direction. Chief Promise, who has swum with us, is appalled, and angrily rejects Shell's allegation that the spill was the result of sabotage. "People died, hundreds of people were ill," he says. "Nets, fishing pots, huts were lost. This is where we fish and farm. We have lost our forest." The chief says Shell was told of the spill within days but did nothing for six months. It then sent contractors who stopped the leak and employed locals to sponge up some of the mess. Shell says it did not respond immediately because it was not welcome in the affected villages, to which it gave cash and a water purification unit. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 1999