Dam in rain-battered Norway partially bursts
COPENHAGEN, Denmark – A dam in southern Norway partially burst Wednesday following days of heavy rain that triggered landslides and flooding in the mountainous region and forced downstream communities to evacuate, officials said.
Authorities initially considered blowing up part of the dam at the Braskereidfoss hydroelectric power plant on the Glåma, Norway’s longest and most voluminous river. The idea was to prevent communities downstream from being inundated by using a limited, controlled blast to release pressure on the dam.
But that proposal was scrapped after water later broke through the structure, police spokesman Fredrik Thomson told reporters.
“The damage from a possible explosion of the concrete plant would be so great that it would serve no purpose,” Thompson said.
Now officials are hopeful that they will see a gradual, even leveling of the water, Thompson said.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre warned that flooding would continue to be a threat as excess water flows downstream.
“This is by no means over,” he said. “It could be the highest water level in 50 years or more.”
The dam’s generators stopped working early Wednesday after a power grid failure, plant operator Hafslund Eco said in a statement.
An automatic system that should have opened the floodgates to release water failed. Rapidly rising water then spilled over the dam and into the power station itself, which caused major damage, officials said.
At least 1,000 people live in communities close to the river in the area, and authorities said that all were evacuated before the dam began to fail.
Over 600 people were evacuated in a region north of Oslo, and police in southern Norway reported that the situation there was chaotic. All main roads between Oslo and Trondheim, Norway’s third-largest city, were closed, road officials said.
The weather system known as Storm Hans has battered parts of Scandinavia and the Baltics for several days, causing rivers to overflow, damaging roads and knocking down branches that injured people.
Two hydrologists said the conflict between old dams and heavier amounts of rain is becoming a more frequent problem.
University of Virginia hydrologist Venkat Lakshmi said his research shows that older dams are unprepared to handle rainfall that comes in heavier, harder-to-manage bursts.
Many of those dams were designed to withstand floods that were supposed to happen only once a century, but those events are now happening much more often, he said.
“This type of conflict between climate and our hydrological infrastructure, such as dams, is going to become more common,” said UCLA hydrologist Park Williams.
Flooding in southern Norway and central Sweden carried away sheds, small houses and mobile homes.
In Sweden’s second-largest city, Goteborg, large parts of the harbor were under water.