Prey Veng, Cambodia News: According to preliminary reports, two people's houses, one of which is a concrete house and the other is wooden, fell into the river in Prey Veng province, after the riverbank under the houses collapsed.
According to the village chief, the landslide occurred at 10 am on December 7, 2019 along the river in Prasat village,but fortunately nobody was hurt. The authorities were notified immediately and two other houses close to the site were evacuated. Officials and local people helped to remove the families' items from the condemned buildings.

The four displaced families said that they are very poor and that the only land they had was their houses on the riverbank, and now they have nothing and nowhere to live. They have asked the government authorities to find them somewhere to live.

In most cases, houses are demolished when riverbank erosion gets near the house, and anything worth reusing is reused. Timber and roof cladding is normally reused. Bricks and concrete are normally not reused.

There is one place where several blocks in a row have a stairway to nowhere. The wooden house was reused, but the concrete stairs remain.

Of course, if there is suddenly a huge amount of erosion, people can be caught out not expecting it.

I believe that Cambodian sand still goes to Singapore. Sand mining is banned in all neighbouring countries but not Cambodia. Eventually the roads, houses and temples on riverbanks will all collapse.
Some parts of the river have natural erosion and that sand is carried to another part of the river. But dredging has made all river banks vulnerable.
Remember the man at Tatai who was throwing hundreds of concrete filled beer cans in the river to try and break the pumps. The sand mining up there was on an industrial scale with large ships. That sand was definitely bound for Singapore.

If I lived near a place where riverbanks are collapsing, I would relocate to another place where this is not a problem. Some Cambodians want to stay in their village with their friends, so they just relocate a bit further from the river. In years to come, the situation is likely to reoccur. In some cases, limited finances restrict them.

Some Cambodians do relocate to somewhere far away.

explorer wrote: ↑Tue Dec 10, 2019 5:48 pm If I lived near a place where riverbanks are collapsing, I would relocate to another place where this is not a problem. Some Cambodians want to stay in their village with their friends, so they just relocate a bit further from the river. In years to come, the situation is likely to reoccur. In some cases, limited finances restrict them.

Some Cambodians do relocate to somewhere far away.

Very helpful information.

'Houses On The River Will Fall': Cambodia's Sand Mining Threatens Vital Mekong
February 27, 202010:00 AM ET
Michael Sullivan
Some 60 million people rely on Southeast Asia's Mekong River for their sustenance. But the Mekong is under threat.
While China is building dams that sharply reduce the water flow and sediment downstream, other countries along the river share some of the blame.

Cambodia, for instance, is experiencing a building boom that is transforming its capital, Phnom Penh. Sitting at the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap rivers, the city's low-slung French colonial architecture is being replaced with high-rise apartment buildings, malls and luxury car dealerships. Sand from the Mekong's sediment is key to that construction growth.

"The benefit from sand dredging is both direct and indirect," says Yos Mony Rath, head of the Cambodian government's Mineral Resources Department. "The sand used in the construction industry helps create jobs and grows the economy. And dredging the river helps make it wider and deeper for boat traffic."

Not only that, he says, but "Phnom Penh is lowland and we need to fill it in before we can begin construction and grow the national economy."

Environmentalists point out that the capital has filled in many of its lakes, including the Boeung Kak, to make way for condos and coffee shops, hampering Phnom Penh's handling of runoff from the annual monsoons and exacerbating flooding.

What's more, taking too much sand from the Mekong is also causing problems for the people who live alongside it.

"When you extract all the sediment from the beds of a river, the river looks for new sediment," says Brian Eyler, a Southeast Asia expert at the Stimson Center think tank and author of Last Days of the Mighty Mekong. "So it pulls the banks of the river into the river, and this has resulted in roads collapsing into the river and lines of homes and towns falling into the river."

In the sand miners' eagerness to extract the sand, not even the dead are safe. Just ask Bean Boren, a monk at the Kdey Takoy temple complex on the Mekong, just outside Phnom Penh.

"One morning, the riverbank started sliding into the river while the boat was pumping sand just offshore, taking two of the temple's stupas [crypts] and the coffins inside with it," he says.

"We managed to pry them open and drag the coffins out before they floated away," he continues. "But the abbot was very angry at the dredging company."

The abbot raised the matter with local authorities, but nothing happened, the monk says. That was over a year ago. When NPR recently visited the temple, another dredger was pumping sand into a barge not 10 yards offshore. Standing on the riverbank in front of the temple, the monk pointed to a foot-wide crack in the ground that he blames on the dredging.

"We're trying to shore up the riverbank to try to protect the [remaining] stupas," he says. "Otherwise you'll see another report on TV about stupas falling into the river and us trying to save the coffins again."
Full article:

CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2020 5:49 pm "The sand used in the construction industry helps create jobs and grows the economy."

That's interesting.

I read in another article that the upper echelon in Cambodia are making untold millions, hand over fist, selling this sand to Singapore....the income from which is virtually untaxed.

While most environmental NGO's have their panties in a twist over illegal luxury wood logging..........most intelligent tycoons have shifted over to raping the riverbeds instead. Very clever

Brody wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2020 6:20 pm

CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2020 5:49 pm "The sand used in the construction industry helps create jobs and grows the economy."

That's interesting.

I read in another article that the upper echelon in Cambodia are making untold millions, hand over fist, selling this sand to Singapore....the income from which is virtually untaxed.

While most environmental NGO's have their panties in a twist over illegal luxury wood logging..........most intelligent tycoons have shifted over to raping the riverbeds instead. Very clever

There were huge discrepancies between the reported amounts of sand leaving Cambodia and arriving in Singapore. Cambodian authorities reported $5 million while the slightly more transparent Singapore reported $752 million.
https://thediplomat.com/2017/01/singapo ... t-on-sand/

Brody wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2020 6:20 pm

CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2020 5:49 pm "The sand used in the construction industry helps create jobs and grows the economy."

That's interesting.

I read in another article that the upper echelon in Cambodia are making untold millions, hand over fist, selling this sand to Singapore....the income from which is virtually untaxed.

While most environmental NGO's have their panties in a twist over illegal luxury wood logging..........most intelligent tycoons have shifted over to raping the riverbeds instead. Very clever

In the same way, you could also say that chopping down the forests creates jobs, stimulates the economy, and clears space for building roads and rubber plantations.

John Bingham wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2020 6:49 pm There were huge discrepancies between the reported amounts of sand leaving Cambodia and arriving in Singapore. Cambodian authorities reported $5 million while the slightly more transparent Singapore reported $752 million.
https://thediplomat.com/2017/01/singapo ... t-on-sand/

Yeah, that's the article I was referring to. Thanks JB.