Word: delta
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Teeming with bird and marine life, giant ferns and towering mangrove plants whose roots straddle land and water like the legs of lumbering animals, the creeks and swamps of the Niger Delta lie over one of the biggest reserves of oil on the planet: 34 billion bbl. of black gold. The region, a watery maze flung across 50,000 sq km in southern Nigeria, is also home to some of Africa's poorest people, and some of its worst environmental destruction. There are villages without power, water, health clinics or schools; pipelines that scar the earth; oil slicks that shimmer...
...Downriver, it's easy to see the cause of this deadly hostility. Since the 1950s, when oil was first found in recoverable quantities, the Delta and the waters off Nigeria's coast in the Gulf of Guinea have made the country and oil majors such as Chevron, Agip, ExxonMobil and Shell hundreds of billions of dollars. Nigeria currently earns more than $3 billion a month from oil - which accounts for some 95% of its export earnings and 40% of its gdp. But the vast majority of the people of the Delta still live in severe and visible poverty...
...workers, storage facilities, bridges, offices and other "soft, oil-industry targets," a mend official wrote in an e-mail to news organizations. But it was also, the e-mail said, a message to "the Chinese government and its oil companies to steer well clear of the Niger Delta. The Chinese government by investing in stolen crude places its citizens in our line of fire." Western companies have grown used to working with the threat of attack. But the dangers are increasing. U.S. oil executive Ricky Wiginton, 51, was shot dead in Port Harcourt by assailants riding a motorbike...
...both state and local level. Many frustrated citizens see next year's elections as a chance to get rid of the party. But the poll could prove bloody. Human-rights lawyer Nsirimovu says opposition groups have realized "that AK-47s are a necessary ingredient in elections in the Niger Delta," and will try to arm their own supporters in an attempt to counter ruling-party intimidation. "Then things will get really ugly." mend, too, is looking toward the election. A militant from the group who spoke with Time on condition of anonymity said that it would fight efforts by supporters...
Several days before Katrina struck, John Walker shut down production and evacuated crews from the oil and gas fields that his company operates in the Mississippi Delta. The CEO of EnerVest, a Houston energy-asset-management firm, was luckier than most. Katrina spared four of his fields, though the damage to a fifth was ugly. The storm blew a barge five miles down the bayou from its moorings in marshy Garden Island Bay. Nearly every piece of oil equipment was destroyed, and Walker estimates it will take several months to get that field running at full capacity. "When there...