The Lake That Suffocated 1,746 People in One Night

The Lake Nyos disaster of August 21, 1986 killed 1,746 people in Cameroon with an invisible cloud of carbon dioxide. The film traces how Lake Nyos at 1,091 meters — just 1.58 sq km but 208 meters deep — stored CO2 like a pressurized soda bottle until a limnic eruption suffocated valleys 23 km away. It follows survivors in Nyos, Kam, Cha and Subum, the 3,500 livestock lost and 4,434 resettled to camps like Buobua, and the three humming degassing pipes now keeping Nyos and the vastly larger Lake Kivu from killing again.