Further to my post of yesterday in relation to the Kaeng Sua Ten dam, I have received the following comment from Chang Noi (of The Nation).
The people in this area have fought against the Kaeng Sua Ten project for twenty years. It’s a very bad project, but irrigation officials and local politicians love it. At every change of government, irrigation officials persuade their minister to raise the issue again. In recent years, they claim the dam will control flooding in the Yom valley. It wasn’t designed for that purpose, and it won’t deliver. There is a risk that many people have forgotten how bad the project is. The attached articles [see link below] were written a decade ago, and are repetitive, but they set out the main issues. Even in cost-benefit terms, the project does not pay. Once you start to compute the environmental costs, it’s a disaster.