Mon and Karen State Residents Fear Increased Flood Risk from Salween Dams

By Save the Salween Network • August 12, 2015

The Save the Salween Network is holding a press conference today in Moulmein, the Mon State capital, to raise concerns about downstream impacts of the planned Salween dams, including the increased risk of flooding.

Like other parts of Burma, Mon and Karen States have suffered from the recent flood disaster, with about 6,300 Hpa-an residents forced to evacuate their homes when the Salween River burst its banks, flooding 1,200 houses in the town between July 18 and August 5.

There are five large dams planned on the Salween River in Burma by Chinese, Thai and Burmese companies, for the export of power to neighbouring countries. Downstream water levels will fluctuate hugely depending on releases of water by the dams, and in times of heavy rainfall, large volumes of water released will greatly increase flooding risks along the river.

“Thousands of people in Hpa-an are currently suffering from the floods. We fear much greater flooding if the Salween dams are built,” said Hpa-an resident Saw Tha Phoe, a spokesperson for the Save the Salween Network.

“People mistakenly believe that dams help prevent flooding, but they don’t. Look at Thailand. The large dams on the Chaophraya River could not stop the massive 2011 flood disaster,” said Sai Khur Hseng, a Shan spokesperson of the Save the Salween Network.

Downstream communities are also fearful that earthquakes could cause dam breakage, unleashing massive quantities of water. The planned Kunlong dam on the Salween river in northern Shan State is situated in a high earthquake risk area.

The Australian company, Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation (SMEC), which is carrying out the EIA/SIA for the largest planned Salween dam, the 241 meter tall Mong Ton dam in southern Shan State, visited Moulmein on July 13, and held a closed door meeting at the General Administrative Department office, denying entry to media and local civil society groups.

The SMEC staff reportedly spoke only of the benefits of the dam, and made no mention of increased flooding risk, or of the danger of salt water intrusion impacting agriculture and fisheries at the Salween delta.

“The dam builders are holding local people in contempt,” said Mon National Party MP Dr. Aung Naing Oo, a resident of Bilugyun island in the Salween delta. “The fate of millions along the Salween river must not be decided behind closed doors.”

The Save the Salween Network is calling for the immediate cancellation of all planned dams on the Salween River.

For more information in each area contact:

1. Dr. Aung Naing Oo +95949803154

2. Saw Tha Phoe +959791607890

3. Oattra Aung +959252171819

4. Nan Kham Naung +959428367849

5. Kyar Phet +66861984832

6. Sai Khur Hseng +66816722031
Download the press release in English here.

မြန္ႏွင့္ကရင္ျပည္နယ္တြင္းေနထုိင္သူမ်ားသံလြင္ေရကာတာ တည္ေဆာက္ ပါက ေရလႊမ္းမုိးမႈအႏၱာရယ္ ပုိမုိႀကီးမားလာမည္ကုိ စုိးရိမ္ျခင္း။

သံလြင္ျမစ္ေပၚေရကာတာမ်ားတည္ေဆာက္ေရးအစီအစဥ္ႏွင့္ျမစ္ေအာက္ပုိင္းထိခုိက္ႏုိင္မႈမ်ားအပါအ၀င္ေရလႊမ္းမိုးျခင္းေၾကာင့္ထိခုိက္ဆုံးရႈံးရသည့္အေၾကာင္းမ်ားကိုလူအမ်ားသတိျပဳမူလာေစရန္ သံလြင္ကာကြယ္ထိန္းသိမ္းေရးကြန္ယက္မွယေန႕မြန္ျပည္နယ္၏ၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္ေမာ္လၿမိဳင္တြင္ သတင္းစာရွင္းလင္းပြဲျပဳလုပ္ပါသည္။

ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတျခားေရလြမ္းမုိးသည့္ေဒသနည္းတူမြန္ႏွင့္ကရင္ျပည္နယ္သည္လည္း ေရေဘးအႏၱာရယ္ႀကီးႀကံဳေတြ႕ရပါသည္။ သံလြင္ျမစ္ေရလွ်ံျခင္းေၾကာင့္(ဇူလႈိင္လ ၁၈ ရက္မွ ၾသဂုတ္လ ၅ ရက္) ၾကားကာလတြင္ ဘားအံေဒသတြင္း ေရလႊမ္းမုိးသျဖင့္ လူေပါင္း ၆၃၀၀ ဦး၊ အိမ္ေျခေပါင္း ၁၂၀၀ အုိးအိမ္စြန္႕ခြာကာ ေဘးကင္းရာသုိ႕ ေျပာင္းေရြ႕ေနထုိင္ၾကရသည္။

သံလြင္ျမစ္ေပၚတြင္ ေရကာတာႀကီး (၅) ခုတည္ေဆာက္ရန္ တရုတ္၊ ထုိင္း ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာကုမၸဏီမ်ား စီစဥ္ေန ၾကသည္။ လွ်ပ္စစ္မီးမ်ားကုိ အိမ္နီးခ်င္းႏုိင္ငံမ်ားသုိ႕ အဓိကသြယ္တန္းအသုံးျပဳမည္ျဖစ္သည္။ လွ်ပ္စစ္ထြက္ရွိမႈပမာဏသည္ေရကာတာမွေရလြတ္ခ်ျခင္းေပၚတြင္မူတည္ေနၿပီး မုိးႀကီးၾကာျမင့္စြာရြာခ်ပါကေရကာတာကေရအားၾကန္႕ခံႏုိင္မႈသည္လည္း အကန္႕အသတ္ေက်ာ္လြန္ပါကေရအလုံးအရင္းလြတ္ခ်ရပါသည္။ သံလြင္ေရတက္ခ်ိန္ မုိးသည္းထန္စြာရြာသြန္းခ်ိန္ေရကာတာမ်ားမွေရလြတ္ခ်ခ်ိန္တၿပိဳင္နက္တည္းျဖစ္ပါက ျမစ္ေအာက္ပုိင္းတေလွ်ာက္ ေရနစ္သြားမည္ျဖစ္သည္။

“လက္ရွိဘားအံေဒသမွာျပည္သူလူထုေထာင္ႏွင့္ခ်ီေရေဘးဒုကၡခံေနရတယ္ သံလြင္ျမစ္ပါထပ္ေဆာက္လုိက္ မယ္ဆုိရင္ ေရလြမ္းမုိးမႈဒဏ္ဘယ္ေလာက္ေတာင္ႀကီးမားမယ္ဆုိတာ မေတြး၀ံ႕ေအာင္ေၾကာက္လန္႕စရာပဲ”ဟုသံလြင္ကာကြယ္ထိန္းသိမ္းေရးကြန္ယက္မွ ေျပာေရးဆုိခြင့္ရွိသူ ဘားအံၿမိဳ႕တြင္းေနထုိင္သည့္ ေစာသာဘုိး ကေျပာၾကားလုိက္သည္။

“ေရကာတာေဆာက္ရင္ေရလြမ္းမုိးမႈကုိကာကြယ္ႏုိင္တယ္လုိ႕လူေတြေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား နားလည္မႈလြဲမွား ၾကတယ္ အျခားႏုိင္ငံမေျပာနဲ႕ အိမ္နီးနားခ်င္းထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံ ေရလြမ္းမုိးခံရတာကုိ မၾကည့္ၾကဘူး၂၀၁၁ခုႏွစ္တုန္းက ေက်ာက္ဖရားျမစ္ေပၚက ဆည္ႀကီးမ်ား ေရႀကီးဒဏ္ကုိမထိန္းႏုိင္လုိ႕ ျမစ္ေအာက္ပုိင္းက ၿမိဳ႕ရြာေတြ လနဲ႕ခ်ီေရနစ္ျမဴပ္ခဲ့တယ္” ဟု ေျပာေရးဆုိခြင့္ရွိသူ စုိင္းေခးဆုိင္ သံလြင္ကာကြယ္ထိန္းသိမ္းေရးကြန္ယက္ ကေျပာပါသည္။

ျမစ္ေအာက္ပုိင္းေနေဒသခံလူထုမ်ားအလြန္စုိးရိမ္ေၾကာက္လန္႕စရာေကာင္းေသာ ေနာက္ထပ္အရာတခုမွာေျမငလွ်င္လႈပ္ပါကအလြန္ေလးလံမ်ားျပားေသာေရအားပမာဏကုိ ေလွာင္ထားသည့္ဆည္တမံႀကီး က်ဳိးသြားပါက အားလုံးတခဏအတြင္း ေရနစ္ျမဴပ္သြားမည္ျဖစ္သည္။ အဘယ္ေၾကာင့္ဆုိေသာ္ရွမ္းျပည္ေျမာက္ပုိင္းသံလြင္ျမစ္ေပၚတြင္တည္ေဆာက္မည့္ ကြန္လုံေရကာတာသည္ ႀကီးမားေသာငလွ်င္ေၾကာ ေပၚတြင္ တည္ရွိေနပါသည္။

ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ေတာင္ပုိင္းသံလြင္ျမစ္ေပၚတြင္အႀကီးမားဆုံးျဖစ္သည့္ ၂၄၁ မီတာရွည္ မုိင္းတုံေရကာတာ တည္ေဆာက္ႏုိင္ေရးအတြက္ SMEC ၾသစေတးလ်ကုမၸဏီသည္ EIA/SIA ေကာက္ယူရန္ (ဇူလႈိင္လ ၁၃ ရက္) ေန႕က ေမာ္လၿမိဳင္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးရုံးတြင္ တံခါးပိတ္အစည္းအေ၀းက်င္းပခဲ့သည္။ ထုိအစည္းအေ၀းသုိ႕ မီဒီယာမ်ား အရပ္ဖက္အဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားတက္ေရာက္ခြင့္မရွိခဲ့ပါ။ SMEC ၾသစေတးလ်ကုမၸဏီတာ၀န္ရွိ၀န္ထမ္းမ်ားသည္မ်ားေသာအားျဖင့္ ေရကာတာ၏ေကာင္းက်ဳိးကုိသာေျပာၾကားၿပီးေရႀကီးရာတြင္အႏၱာရယ္ရွိေၾကာင္း ပင္လယ္၀ႏွင့္ဆက္စပ္သည့္ျမစ္၀ကြ်န္းေပၚေဒသတြင္ ဆားငန္ေရမ်ားတက္ၿပီး ၄င္းေဒသ၏လယ္ယာ စုိက္ပ်ဳိးေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားပ်က္စီးေစသည့္အေၾကာင္းမ်ားႏွင့္ တံငါလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားထိခုိက္ေစေသာအေၾကာင္းမ်ားထုတ္ေဖၚေျပာဆုိျခင္းမရွိပါ။
“ေရကာတာတည္ေဆာက္သူေတြဟာ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တုိ႕ျပည္သူလူထုေတြကုိ မထီမဲ့ျမင္လစ္လွ်ဴရႈၿပီး သူတုိ႕လုိခ်င္ တဲ့အတုိင္း အစည္းအေ၀းလာလုပ္သြားတာပဲ ႕႕႕႕႕႕႕ သံလြင္ျမစ္ေၾကာင္းတေလွ်ာက္ သန္းနဲ႕ခ်ီၿပီးေနထုိင္ေနတဲ့ ေဒသခံလူထုေတြရဲ႕ ကံၾကမၼာကုိ ဒီတံခါးပိတ္အစည္းအေ၀း တစ္ခုတည္းက ဆုံးျဖတ္ေပးလုိ႕မရဘူး”ဟုမြန္ေဒသလုံးဆုိင္ရာဒီမုိကေရစီပါတီလႊတ္ေတာ္ကုိယ္စားလွယ္ ေဒါက္တာေအာင္ႏုိင္ဦး ကေျပာပါသည္။

သံလြင္ျမစ္ေပၚတည္ေဆာက္မည့္ေရကာတာမ်ားအားလုံးခ်က္ခ်င္းရပ္တန္႕ရန္ သံလြင္ကာကြယ္ထိန္းသိမ္းေရး ကြန္ယက္မွ အတိအလင္းသေဘာထားထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကျငာသည္။
ေဒသအသီးသီး၏အေသးစိတ္အခ်က္မ်ားသိရွိလုိပါက ေအာက္ပါအတုိင္းဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္းႏုိင္ပါသည္ –

(၁) ေဒါက္တာေအာင္ႏုိင္ဦး +95949803154

(၂) ေစာသာဘိုး +959791607890

(၃) ဥတၱရာေအာင္ +959252171819

(၄) နန္းခမ္းေနာင့္ +959428367849

(၅) ဦးၾကာဖက္ +66861984832

(၆) စုိင္းေခးဆုိင္ +66816722031

သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ ျမန္မာဘာသာကို ဤေနရာတြင္ ေဒါင္းလုပ္ရယူႏိုင္ပါသည္။

Tags: Dams, Karen State, Mon State, Salween River, Save the Salween Network, Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation

This post is in: Press Release

Mon and Karen State Residents Fear Increased Flood Risk from Salween Dams

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