CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Sat Sep 01, 2018 3:34 pm Southeast Asia May Be Building Too Many Dams Too Fast
The promise of plentiful energy has brought major environmental risk to fish, soil, and people.
By Stefan Lovgren
PUBLISHED August 23, 2018

Stung Treng, Cambodia: A July night had just fallen over the tiny fishing village of Sdao, on the Sekong River in northern Cambodia, when a man on a motorcycle appeared with an urgent message, delivered by loudspeaker: “Evacuate now,” he called out to the few hundred families living here. “A flood is coming.”

A dam under construction some 155 miles (250 kilometers) upstream, in neighboring Laos, had collapsed the day before after heavy monsoon rains, sending a deluge of water down the already swollen, swirling Sekong. The floodwaters, villagers were told, could reach as far as Stung Treng, the provincial capital in northern Cambodia where the Sekong joins the even larger Mekong River.

Ey Bun Thea, a 24-year-old fisherman and farmer, had no idea that a dam was being built farther up the same river where he fishes every day. But he knew he had to get out quickly. He pulled together some valuables—rice, blankets, mosquito nets, some cash—and after releasing his animals he escaped with his wife and young child into the dark, in search of higher ground. “It was very scary,” he said. “We didn’t know what was going to happen.”

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/envi ... te-change/