Fire on Water

John was in the hold of his wooden transport boat when the flames ran across the water on a slick of oil and set his hull ablaze. 

The Niger Delta is a tangle of creeks. These creeks are cut through by thousands of kilometres of oil and gas pipelines. These pipelines often leak and they are often tapped and plumbed into a multi-hundred million dollar illegal oil economy.  At night, an orange haze of gas flares and furnaces from hundreds of illegal refineries hangs above the creeks. Sometimes it is people who are burning and the fire services are nowhere to be seen.