In Laos, a boom followed by ‘the water is coming!’
At least 26 are dead, 131 missing after dam bursts, floods villages
PAKSONG, Laos — Petchinda Chantamart first heard what sounded like a bomb going off a few miles away. Then came a curious noise, like a strong wind.
She knew instinctively what it meant: One of the new dams under construction near her village in southern Laos had failed. She began banging on her neighbors’ doors, she recounted, urging them to flee to higher ground.
“The water is coming!” Chantamart roared.
Within a half-hour, the water in her village, Xay Done Khong, was more than 30 feet deep and rising.
Chantamart, 35, and many of her neighbors escaped the deadly flood. But others were not so lucky when an auxiliary dam, part of the billion-dollar Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy hydroelectric project, failed Monday evening amid heavy rains, sending more than 170 billion cubic feet of water rushing downstream.
Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith said 131 people were still missing and more than 3,000 were homeless. Many had been rescued from rooftops and trees after villages and farmland were flooded.
At least 26 people have been reported killed.
“A second step for us will be to recover and identify the deceased, but for now, we hurry to find those who are still alive in the area,” Bounhom Phommasane, the governor of the district of Sanamxay, told the Vientiane Times.
Chantamart said that hundreds of people from her village had escaped but that 15 people were still missing, nine of them children.
“I’m very worried about them, from the bottom of my heart,” she said.
After she and hundreds of others scrambled to higher ground Monday, soldiers and local officials moved them to the town of Paksong, west of the dam site, to take refuge in an empty warehouse normally used to store coffee.
Video posted by the Thai News Agency showed vast quantities of water cascading over what appeared to be the diminished structure of the dam, known as Saddle Dam D.
The main builder of the hydropower project, SK Engineering & Construction of South Korea, said it would investigate whether the dam had collapsed or overflowed because of heavy rains.
International Rivers, an advocacy group that has opposed the rapid growth of hydropower dams in Laos, said in a statement posted online that the auxiliary dam had collapsed as flooding from heavy monsoon rains caused it to overflow Monday night.
The group, which seeks to protect rivers around the world, said the disaster showed that many dams were not designed to handle extreme weather events like the rains Monday.
“Unpredictable and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent due to climate change, posing grave safety concerns to millions who live downstream of dams,” International Rivers said.