BOMI COUNTY — President George Weah has disclosed that his wife, Madam Clar Weah, has an intention to develop the famous Blue Lake in Bomi County into a tourist site. He made the disclosure in Bomi County at the start of second phase of his county tour.
President Weah said that Mrs. Weah’s intention needs the approval of citizens of Bomi County.
“While we await response from the people of Bomi County, we have already done a very good sketch to include lagoon, restaurant. The First lady is ready to develop blue lake but only if the people of Bomi will agree,” President George Weah.
Blue lake is a key attraction, in Bomi County. Blue Lake is about 300 feet deep. It is suspended midway between the peaks of the surrounding mountains which, with the sun’s reflection, give the lake its blue hue. The waters spring from a huge pit dug by the Liberia Mining Company, an American-owned company that ceased operations in the country because of the presumed depletion of iron ore in the area.
As of the 2008 census, Tubmanburg has an estimated population of 13,144. Of this, 6,555 were male and 6,559 female.
The town is populated predominantly by the Gola ethnic group, which hails from Bomi County. The town also has a significant Mandingo and Vai population.
Back in the 1960s and ‘70s, the LMC began operations in the Bomi Hills near the town of Tubmanburg. The company dug a series of huge pits to extract iron ore from the hills, but by the late 1970s, the ore reserves were deemed depleted and the company closed its operations.
The LMC left a landscape pockmarked by pits, so much so that locals began to wryly refer to the Bomi Hills as the Bomi Holes. And the mining company had left so quickly that they even abandoned some of their equipment at the bottom of the craters.
It was a mess, but one that nature slowly began to reclaim. And as it did so, one of the largest pits took on a whole new life of its own. Despite being stuck up in the hills and isolated from any obvious sources of water, the 300-foot-deep pit began to fill with water, likely fed by a spring somewhere down below.
By the end of the 1990s, the lake looked like a totally natural formation. And in 2007, Senator Richard Devine, in whose constituency the lake was situated, began to promote the wonders of what he billed as “a natural phenomenon and …. a wonderful sight to behold.”