Civil society organizations and environmentalists have urged the Federal Government to immediately declare a state of emergency in Bille Kingdom, a coastal community in the Degema Local Government Area of Rivers State, following a worsening ecological and public health crisis.

The urgent call follows a prolonged environmental hazard where toxic gas has been bubbling from beneath the earth and across local waterways for more than six months, severely contaminating the community’s primary sources of drinking water and crippling local livelihoods.

Speaking on Saturday after leading a delegation of journalists to assess the impacted coastal sites, the Executive Director of Social Action, Isaac Osuoka, described the situation as an absolute emergency that directly threatens human survival.

Osuoka expressed deep concern over the visible environmental degradation, noting that the water wells and surrounding rivers that the indigenous population entirely depends upon are heavily heavily polluted. He lamented that despite repeated, frantic appeals sent to federal authorities by the leadership of Bille Kingdom, the government has failed to deploy emergency relief, containment teams, or remediation experts to the area.

The environmental assessment visit triggered spontaneous protests by local residents, including women and youth groups. The demonstrators displayed placards alongside civil society actors to demand immediate regulatory attention. Some of the inscriptions on the placards read: “Our mangroves are gone, our water polluted,” “No farming, no fishing, no livelihood anymore in Bille,” and “The gas bubbles are not decorations, they are poison.”

The leadership of Social Action strongly criticized the perceived indifference of the statutory regulatory bodies overseen by the federal government—specifically the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA) and the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC). Osuoka pointed out that despite previous assessment visits and generic promises made by commission officials to investigate the source of the gas leakage, no concrete containment actions or cleanup frameworks have been activated on the ground.

Echoing the demands of the host communities, the Chairman of the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC), Eastern Zone, Datolu Sukubo, accused federal authorities of gross negligence and environmental injustice. Sukubo raised alarms over the absence of a comprehensive scientific and environmental impact study to determine the exact cause of the continuous gas discharge and its long-term health implications on the population. He questioned why specialized subsidence and geological studies have not been commissioned for Bille, noting that the scale of multi-point gas bubbling in community water wells is a unique and highly dangerous phenomenon that requires extraordinary intervention.