Laos survivors recount sudden dam deluge
KHOKONG (Reuters) — The first warning came at 4 p.m. One hour later the water started to flow through the village, and by late evening it was a torrent.
Inpon Sivatan was at home on Monday afternoon when the village chief knocked on his door to warn that their remote hamlet in the southern tip of Laos was about to be flooded.
“The water came really fast. It just rushed through the village,” said Inpon, 55, as he tidied his house in Khokong, one of the seven villages that was all but obliterated when a nearby hydropower dam collapsed on Monday, sending a wall of water crashing across mountains, jungle and rural communities.
“I’ve lived here for 32 years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Inpon said.
A medical official in a nearby settlement, who asked not to be named, said locals received an alert about three to four hours before the dam burst but few took it seriously and did not expect the water to rise as high as it did.
The Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy Power Company, a hydropower project that involves Laotian, Thai and South Korean firms, on Monday told local officials in a letter written in English that one of its subsidiary dams was “unsafe” and had started to overflow, and requested that they inform downstream villages.
It was not clear what time the letter, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, was delivered.
At 8 p.m. that evening, according to state media, Saddle Dam D — part of a network of two main dams and five subsidiary dams — failed, and the deluge began.
The scale of the disaster in the southern province of Attapeu was still unclear yesterday, in part because of the inaccessibility of the area but also because reports from the isolated and poverty-stricken country’s state media have been scant, sketchy and sometimes inconsistent.