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Myanmar dam breach floods 100 villages, evacuates 50,000

Thursday, August 30, 2018

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Myanmar-damAt least one person is missing and nearly 50,000 people have been evacuated after the sluice gates of a dam in central Myanmar burst, flooding around 100 villages on Wednesday morning.

 

State media has reported that the Swar Chaung dam in Yedashe township, Bago region, began to overflow on Monday but told residents there was no cause for concern. At around 5:30am on Wednesday, however, a deluge of water burst out of the dam, inundating acres of rice fields and causing a bridge on a highway connecting Yangon and Mandalay, Myanmar’s biggest cities, to buckle.

 

Aung Zaw Htay, an official from the Myanmar Fire Services Department mentioned that the damage is not bad, but the bridge is unusable because the water is still receding.

 

Authorities have not yet released any casualty figures.

 

The Swar Chaung dam was built around 2001, according to Kyaw Myint Hlaing, the director-general of Myanmar’s irrigation department. He said the cause of the breach had not yet been identified, but he ruled out a flaw in the dam’s design.

 

He then went on to add that the design of the dam’s spillway is like the beak of a duck. One of the ‘beaks’ broke, but the dam itself has not broken.

 

The breach occurred after a series of earlier floods in southern and central Myanmar in late July, during which the authorities only instructed many residents to evacuate after their homes were already under several feet of water.

 

About 150,000 people were displaced, many of whom have become reliant on private food donations after their crops were destroyed. Residents of one flooded village in Bago region said authorities had only provided aid to pregnant women and mothers of children under six months old.

 

As in earlier floods, Myanmar authorities have placed much of the responsibility to avoid danger on the victims.

 

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