By Ikechukwu Eze
Posted to the Web: Saturday, October 29, 2005

Identity cards, uncashed bank cheque, Nigerian passports, used airline ticket stubs and bibles were among some personal belongings picked from the crash site by anxious relations and rescue workers, Sunday evening.

But getting to Lisa was more tortuous for the relations, journalists, rescue workers and adventurers who embarked on the journey after news filtered in that the ill-fated flight had at last been located several hours after the aircraft went down.

It progressed like a trip to nowhere. It was one hour into the journey from Ifo bus stop and the dare-devil commercial motorcyclist (okada man) was still going at break-neck speed. His pace was quite inconsistent with the narrow, erosion-tortured dirty track that snaked on endlessly. It was getting dark, a situation worsened by the cover provided by interlocking foliage from the sprawling thick forests.

Of course, one saw it coming and that did not need a soothsayer’s crystal ball. The cyclist and this reporter fell after the bike attempted to hop over a sudden deep crater on the road. There was no obvious injury, just a mild pain on the left foot.

Naturally, there was apprehension of some sort but the journalist’s instinct took over: rather than spare a moment to nurse the pain, one’s mind was already tinkering with an appropriate headline: ‘An Okada crash on the way to the plane crash scene.’

When the editor deployed one last Sunday afternoon to go in search of the site of the Bellview Airlines plane which crashed Saturday night, information about the actual location of the disaster was still scanty. “Get to Ifo in Ogun State and find your way to a village called Lisa.” That was all the brief.

At Ifo, many people admitted that they had heard about Lisa and the crash but only a handful knew how to get there, since according to them, the place could only be reached on a bike. I talked to several commercial bike operators who declined. Later, one brave okadaman popularly called Ebube named an outrageous price. There was no other option than to accept.

As the journey progressed, the road became narrower and more dangerous as the forests turned thicker. It was a journey further and further away from civilisation. No houses, no farms, just the enveloping groove. There were many motorbikes already abandoned in the forests. Ebube guessed that some either did not have enough fuel for the long journey or they buckled under the strain of the rough terrain.

The feeling of expectation and adventure gradually gave way to despair and utter apprehension. It got worse when one finally lost service on my GSM phone. How can I be traced in the wilderness if anything went wrong with the journey? There was the thought about returning to Ifo, but what would one tell my editor? How were we going to inform our readers?

“Keep going, it is still far away,” was the refrain we kept getting each time the cyclist tried to find out the location of Lisa from the people we passed.
I have always wondered why most plane crashes occur in the middle of nowhere: either in the wilderness, on rocky mountains or into the bowels of the deep blue sea, away from human habitation. Perhaps, that is God’s intervention to save cities from devastation and limit the damage.

Finally, we didn’t need anybody to tell us when we eventually got to our destination. Lisa, a sleepy, hilly settlement amidst a cluster of low-lying houses, that evening transformed into a centre of global attention. Fire service trucks, Lagos State government ambulances, Red Cross road runners and cars, mostly SUVs belonging to relatives of crash victims had already made their way to the village. Hundreds of people, mostly curious youths, thronged the narrow beaten path to the crash scene. Dusk was setting in. But not to an extent to prevent those arriving at that time to still see the devastation caused by the sudden coming down of the Boeing 737 aircraft in the wild.

From a distance, it looked as though a forest had been cleared by a bulldozer to signal the beginning of the construction of a gigantic stadium. Big trees were uprooted and shrubs cut to size. Perhaps, the experienced pilot still had the state of mind to attempt a tutored landing as there was ample evidence of efforts made to taxi. But since there is no runway in the bush, the plane only ran for a short distance before slamming its nose into the ground with an impact that created a crater deep and wide enough to bury a skyscraper. Obviously part of the ill-fated plane remained buried in the crater as smoke was still coming out from under the earth by Sunday night.

And all that could be seen were small pieces of metals and other splintered plane parts scattered all over the forest as pieces of papers and other documents were strewn all over the place.

The sight was awe-inspiring. Nondescript roasted body parts and strands of flesh were clinging to trees, shrubs and grasses. It was the sight of disaster beyond description, a crash which manner of destruction had no precedence. Except forensic experts think otherwise, the option of easy identification was simply not there as there were really nothing anybody could call human bodies; only burnt, chopped parts and crushed skulls.

The rescue workers could only but gather as much human parts that were put into one big bag, as Nigerians continue to lament the long hours taken before the crash site could be located. Soldiers, firemen, villagers, sympathisers and relatives of the victims and other onlookers stood in awe, as if pondering the futility of humanity.
Questions were asked without waiting for answers. Tears rolled down cheeks freely and mouths that were aghast found it difficult to speak. Indeed, people were too shocked to speak.

The only sound of life came from the generating set powering the Outside Broadcasting (OB) van of one television station which had braved it to the bush to beam live reports to people’s living rooms. “It’s so sad that it took Nigeria such long hours to find out where something as big as a plane crashed.” That was all one man managed to say to break the silence.

The Baale of Lisa village, Chief Sadiku Odugbemi told Saturday Vanguard that the villagers had not seen anything like that before, stressing that they were only lucky to be alive to tell the story. “What if the plane had crashed directly on the tiny houses in this small village with villagers already gone to bed? All of us would have been history,” he said.

The night before, Chief Odugbemi told this reporter that the villagers saw a huge ball of fire fly over their heads, then a loud bang and a defeaning sound like a thousand cars crashing. They were too afraid to come out of their homes that night, so it was only in the morning that they managed to go to the sight of the crash.
Ironically, the crash site belongs to Odugbemi. According to him, the place was his farm which he had been tending for about ten years. He planted cassava, cocoa, kola and oranges which were all destroyed in the devastation.

The Baale was emphatic that he would not be asking for any compensation because the villagers were also saddened by the unfortunate incident. His plea was that the government should conduct an environmental impact assessment to determine whether the affected farm land still retained its fertility, especially after the impact of the crash. But more than that, he pleads with the government to do everything to ensure that no epidemic results from the crash that may hit Lisa villagers.