Laos: at least 26 dead in the collapse of a dam

The dam, which gave way Monday in the south of the country has also made at least 131 missing. The isolation of the region complicates relief operations.
  

After the collapse of a dam, Laotian Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith delivered an initial badessment of the disaster Wednesday: "there are 131 missing", all Laotian. The official KPL news agency of this very closed communist state had so far evoked "hundreds of missing people", including fifty in the only village of Ban Mai.

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"Twenty-six bodies have now been recovered, seventeen wounded people transported to hospital", said to AFP Chana Miencharoen, the Thai consul in Laos present on the spot. "We can not yet badess the number of missing," he said, the balance sheet should increase in the hours to come. The disaster occurred in the south, near the Cambodian and Vietnamese borders.

Images filmed by the local media show people on the roof waiting for help, others fleeing with the few objects they could save. The floods swamped a vast area including seven villages. Clothing, food and drinking water were distributed by Red Cross teams arriving at the scene.

Nearly 750 people found shelter inside a warehouse in a neighboring province several tens of kilometers from the scene of the tragedy, noted an AFP journalist. According to the Thai consul, more than 6,000 people are still homeless. Relief operations are complicated because the stricken area, very isolated, is only accessible by helicopter or by boat, the roads having been badly damaged, or even completely carried away.

Insufficient safety measures

Have the safety measures taken by the companies responsible for the construction of the dam been sufficient? Survivors, met by AFP, complained that they had not been warned in time of the risks they were facing, while damage, caused by the heavy rains of the monsoons, had been spotted on the structure several days before its collapse.

One of the South Korean operators of the project has indeed declared that as of Friday "eleven centimeters of subsidence" had "been detected in the center of the dam". Another South Korean operator said that "the upper part of the dam" was carried away Sunday at 21:00 (14:00 GMT), nearly 24 hours before the total collapse of the structure that released 500 million tons of oil. water. On Sunday, "we immediately alerted the authorities and started evacuating the villagers" who were nearby, one of the South Korean companies badured.

This disaster "raises important questions about the safety of dams in Laos, including their relevance to weather conditions", in this country hit each year by the monsoon, said Maureen Harris, of the NGO International Rivers. The dam was to start supplying electricity as early as 2019, 90% of which was to be exported to neighboring Thailand, the rest to be distributed by the local network.