The coastal area of the Niger Delta is the home to oil explorations and exploitations in Nigeria. Oil spill incidents are common along the Nigeria. The main sources of oil spill on the Niger Delta are: vandalisation of the oil pipelines by the local inhabitants; ageing of the pipelines; oil blow outs from the flow stations; cleaning of oil tankers on the high sea and disposal of used oil into the drains by the road side mechanics. By far the most serious source of oil spill is through the vandalisation of pipelines either as a result of civil disaffection with the political process or as a criminal activity. To reduce the rate of oil incidents along the Nigerian Coast particularly as a result of vandalisation, the Federal Government through an act of the National Assembly created the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC). Part of the responsibilities of the commission is to develop a master plan for the development of the Niger Delta, provide infrastructure and create an enabling environment for industrialisation and employment. There are also several other laws dealing with issues related to oil pollution in the environment. Also, standards for the development of the environmental sensitivity index maps for the coast of Nigeria have been developed by the Environmental Systems Research institute (ESRI). These standards are to be used by all the oil companies to prepare ESI maps for their areas of operations in Nigeria. Furthermore, apart from the mechanical and chemical oil spill cleaning methods that have been used in managing oil spill problems, oil spill models have on several occasions being used to manage oil spills on the Nigerian Coast. A number of Federal and state agencies deal with the problems of oil spill in Nigeria. The agencies include: the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), the Federal Ministry of Environment, the State Ministries of Environment and the National Maritime Authority. There is also the “Clean Nigeria Associates” which is an umbrella through which the Oil companies tackle major oil spills. There is a need to create serious awareness among the populace on the implications of oil spill incidents on the environment. Governments must assist the rural communities in claiming their rights on oil spills and ensure that digital ESI maps are readily available for managing oil spill maps. Government should have strict rules for local oil tankers that would ply our coastal and inland waters as a result of the new cabotage law that is just being passed into law in the country.
Bathymetry survey of Part of Badagry Creek and Yewa River was conducted with the aim of investigating the topography changes in depth between two epoch dataset by calculating the volume of sediment and dredged material between the two periods. Depth sounding at 100m interval, data grid of 100 m interval, constant vessel speed of 2.2 m/secs (8Km/hr) for data capture, data storage at interval of 30 Secs was ensured at both the creek and the river. Seabed topography changes of Part of Badagry Creek and Yewa River was investigated. The two dataset investigated was the data acquired in September 2008 and November 2015. Data acquisition was done using digital echo sounder SDE28, Handheld Real time Kinematic (RTK) Global Positioning System (GPS) in acquiring the spatial coordinates (x, y) and water depth (z). Six (6) wrecks (Shipping Boat) were determined along both the creek and the river. The initial processing was carried out with the use of HYPACK 2008 software for data sorting. ArcGIS 10.2.1 was used for data analysis as well as graphics design. The processed depths were presented in form of tables, map/plan and charts. 2The result showed that In 2008, the depth observed ranges from (-0.5 to 10.4) m while in 2015, the depth observed ranges from (-0.32 to 10.85) m which implies that some area have been cut. Also, the results of the volume of deposited sediments and dredged material are computed as 10.55 x 106 m3 and 7.24 x 106 m3. It showed from the result that volume of accreted sediment is greater than volume of the material dredged. Increase in volume of sediment deposited could be as a result of the adjoining river Yewa flowing into the larger river (tributaries) of the Badagry Creek. Therefore, further studies need to carry out in order to know the source of accreted mass through integrated coastal management plan.
Water current modelling and prediction techniques along coastal inlets have attracted growing concern in recent years. This is largely so because water current component continues to be a major contributor to movement of sediments, tracers and pollutants, and to a whole range of offshore applications in engineering, environmental observations, exploration and oceanography. However, most research works are lacking adequate methods for developing precise prediction models along the commodore channel in Lagos State. This research work presents water current prediction using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The Back Propagation (BP) technique with feed forward architecture and optimized training algorithm known as Levenbergq-Marquardt was used to develop a Neural Network Water Current Prediction model-(NNWLM) in a MATLAB programming environment. It was passed through model sensitivity analysis and afterwards tested with data from the Commodore channel (Lagos Lagoon). The result revealed prediction accuracy ranging from 0.012 to 0.045 in terms of Mean Square Error (MSE) and 0.80 to 0.83 in terms of correlation coefficient (R-value). With this high performance, the Neural network developed in this work can be used as a veritable tool for water current prediction along the Commodore channel and in extension a wide variety of coastal engineering and development, covering sediment management program: dredging, sand bypassing, beach-contingency plans, and protection of beaches vulnerable to storm erosion and monitoring and prediction of long-term water current variations in coastal inlets. Keywords: Artificial Neural Network, Commodore Channel, Coastal Inlet, Water Current, Back Propagation.
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