Thomas H. Colledge

Oil Pipeline Catastrophe Mitigation

Each year, hundreds of Nigerians are killed when the pipelines running under slum areas of Nigeria's delta region are tapped to extract petroleum from them. Very often this results in explosions and many injuries and deaths. In addition, environmental catastrophes result. The project undertaken by the collaborative design teams from Penn State and the University of Lagos was to devise a system to enable surveillance and prevention methods to reduce the number of thefts, and also to prepare an environmental catastrophe mitigation plan to minimize the damage to the environment should a spill occur.