Baby saved from Laos dam disaster by Thai cave rescue volunteers
APPATEU , Laos: The rescue of a baby boy, terrified and hungry after days without food, has been captured in a viral video showing the infant survivor of a dam collapse in southern Laos being carefully carried through swirling flood waters and waisthigh mud.
Footage of volunteers from Thailand rescuing 14 people, including the baby, went viral when it was released on Friday as an increasingly international relief mission scrambles to save lives in a disaster that has left scores dead and missing.
The survivors were stranded by f lood waters after they f led up a hill on Monday as the XeNamnoy dam broke under heavy rain, leaving several villages devastated by flash floods.
The torrent of water unleashed in dam collapse has also drained into Cambodia, forcing thousands to evacuate.
The Thai team, who waded several kilometres through rushing water carrying uprooted trees and debris to rescue the group, are fresh from efforts to help free a youth football team trapped in a cave in the north of their country.
They have now come to help out in neighbouring Laos, which is poorly equipped to deal with natural disasters of this scale.
“The boy is four months old. He didn’t have fever but he was crying, maybe because of the cold weather,” Kengkard Bongkawong, one of the rescuers told AFP.
“The baby was crying and looks terrified. Actually they were (all) still terrified of the rushing water.” The video had been watched nearly half a million times hours after it was posted online on Friday.
Earlier this week officials said 27 bodies had been retrieved so far, with the country’s prime minister reporting 131 missing.
KOKHONG: The first warning came at 4.00 pm, 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 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 ‘ unsafety’ 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 8.00pm 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 povertystricken country’s state media have been scant, sketchy and sometimes inconsistent.
But in Khokong, the scale of the damage was palpable. Every inch of this sleepy farming community was covered in a swamp of viscous, burnt- orange mud.
A dead baby water buffalo lay motionless, its head buried in the thick clay. Dogs still trapped in wooden stilt houses howled for their owners.
“I lost everything,” said Inpon, who tried in vain to rescue his car by driving it to the highest point in the village - a nearby petrol station. “There was not enough time to get out”.
“My pigs, my crops. My house is ruined”.
The unstoppable force of the water released from the dam devastated the meagre road between Khokong and its nearest big town, Attapeu, complicating rescue efforts to bring food and water across dangerous, muddied, roads and the search for trapped survivors.
The Lao army has set up checkpoints to filter the deluge of well-wishing volunteers who have driven overland from other parts of Laos and from neighbouring Thailand into the secretive communist country.
Some of those volunteers have donated a rag-tag armada of wooden fishing boats, jet-skis and inflatable banana boats to navigate the sea of mud so rescuers can ferry drinking water to villages like Khokong.
As Inpon fruitlessly mopped the porch of his waterlogged house, a young family evacuated their stilt home in the rain. Outside, two young girls used a broken oar to steer mud- sodden mattresses like rafts.
Initial reports had suggested the death toll from the burst dam could climb to several hundred, and on Wednesday the Vientiane Times reported some 3,000 people were still waiting to be rescued from swirling floodwaters, many of them on trees and the rooftops of submerged houses.