[At a news conference on Wednesday, the prime minister, Thongloun Sisoulith, said that 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.]
By Mike Ives and Richard C.
Paddock
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Displaced
residents seeking shelter in Paksong, Laos, on Wednesday.
Credit
Ben C. Solomon/The New York Times
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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!” Ms. Chantamart roared.
Within a half-hour, the water in her village,
Xay Done Khong, was more than 30 feet deep, and rising.
Ms. 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.
At a news conference on Wednesday, the prime
minister, Thongloun Sisoulith, said that 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.
Ms. Chantamart said that hundreds of people
from her village had escaped, but that 15 people were still missing, nine of
them children. She had been unable to reach their homes on Monday because the
floodwaters had climbed too high.
“I’m very worried about them, from the bottom
of my heart,” she said.
After she and hundreds of others scrambled to
higher ground on 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 official Lao News Agency reported that
the dam had collapsed. 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 on 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 on 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.
People living below the dam had only a few
hours’ warning to evacuate before it failed, according to the group.
“Communities were not given sufficient
advanced warning to ensure their safety and that of their families,” the
statement said. “This event raises major questions about dam standards and dam
safety in Laos, including their appropriateness to deal with weather conditions
and risks.”
Seven villages in Sanamxay, which is in
Attapeu Province, were flooded and more than 6,000 people were displaced by the
dam’s failure, officials said.
The disaster cleanup may be further
complicated by old American bombs and other explosives buried in the area, a
legacy of the Vietnam War era that has haunted Laos for decades.
Attapeu Province, which borders Vietnam and
Cambodia, is heavily contaminated with what disarmament experts call unexploded
ordnance, which can detonate on unsuspecting civilians even after decades of
lurking undisturbed. The flooding could make the ordnance harder for
decontamination teams to find.
“There is immediate concern for the safety of
personnel from survey, clearance and survivor assistance programs who may have
been in the impacted area at the time,” said Mark Hiznay, the associate arms
director at Human Rights Watch’s Washington office.
The Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy is one of 70 hydropower
plants that are planned, underway or have been built in Laos, most of them
owned and operated by private companies, International Rivers said.
The project consists of major dams on three
tributaries of the giant Mekong River as well as several smaller auxiliary
dams, or saddle dams, including the one that failed.
South Korea and Thailand were mobilizing
emergency assistance. Companies from both countries are involved in building
and financing the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy project, which was supposed to provide 90
percent of its electricity to Thailand once it began operating.
President Moon Jae-in of South Korea
instructed his government on Wednesday to dispatch a rescue and emergency
relief team to Laos.
“The investigation is still underway to find
out the causes of the dam incident, but our government should waste no time in
actively participating in the rescue and relief operations at the scene because
our own businesses are involved in the construction,” Mr. Moon said, according
to his office.
Repeated phone calls to the spokesman’s
office at SK Engineering & Construction’s headquarters in Seoul went
unanswered on Wednesday.
Korea Western Power Company, which has a
contract to operate the power plant when it is completed, said its officials
and workers from SK Engineering & Construction in Laos had joined the
rescue and relief efforts. SK deployed one helicopter and 11 boats, and Korea
Western Power sent two boats and its local medical staff.
On Wednesday evening, a heavy rain was
falling on the corrugated roof of the makeshift shelter in Paksong where a few
hundred people had found shelter.
The sky, cloudy in the afternoon, had turned
as murky as gauze. A few ambulances streaked by in the gathering dusk, leaving
smudgy trails of red and blue lights in their wake.
Inside, adults and children were milling
around in sandals and soiled clothes, eating sticky rice from plastic foam
bowls. Some sat on blue-and-orange tarps that had been spread on the concrete
floor, and many looked on with vacant stares.
A makeshift canteen, with steaming pots of
sticky rice, had been set up in the warehouse’s covered parking lot.
Ms. Chantamart said she had little hope that
anything was left of her home or her village.
“Every single house, gone,” she said.
Ms. Chantamart said she was not sure whom to
hold responsible for the flood. But she said the government and the company
behind the dam should take more action to help the victims.
“People here are shocked, scared and sorry
for each other because of our loss,” she said, as children in soiled
sweatshirts crowded around her.
About 70 percent of the people in her village
were from minority ethnic groups, she said. Most grew rice and coffee.
Occasionally, they found work as day laborers.
Khamla Souvannasy, an official from Paksong,
said the local authorities were struggling to support the hundreds of people
who had gathered at the warehouse.
“The weather is an obstacle,” he said as a
bout of particularly heavy rain lashed the warehouse’s roof. “We’re still
looking for mattresses.”
He added: “The disaster came so quickly.
There’s no way to be prepared for that, but we’ll just keep working and
working.”
“Everyone here lost everything — animals, our
houses,” said Den Even Den, a farmer from Xay Done Khong. “All we have left is
our lives.”
