S. Korea completes 'Peace Dam' to block flood attack from North

Special to World Tribune.com
EAST-ASIA-INTEL.COM
Thursday, October 27, 2005

The just-completed Peace Dam, just south of heavily fortified border, is the latest evidence that the Cold War is not over on the Korean peninsula.

The 'Peace Dam' just South of the DMZ.
After 18 years of on-again off-again work, South Korea finished constructing the large dam last week. The dam is designed to prevent a flood attack from the North should Pyongyang deliberately collapse a dam farther upstream.

In September, North Korea released a massive amount of water from a dam just north of the border without warning, causing massive flooding in the South's border area, reminding residents of the perils of living next to the communist neighbor that invaded the South five decades ago.

Floods caused by the North occurred in October 2001 and in September 2002 causing hundred of thousands dollars in damages.

The Peace Dam, 601 meters wide at the top and 125 meters high, has a water storage capacity of 2.63 billion tons, according to the Ministry of Construction and Transportation. It cost 400 billion Won ($380 million).

The dam is located about 125 kilometers northeast of Seoul and is intended to mitigate damages in case North Korea's Imnam or Mt. Kumgang dam collapsed, ministry officials said.

The North Korean dam is 710 meters wide and 121.5 meters high and has a claimed capacity of 2.62 billion tons of water. The dam was completed in 2003.

"According to computer mock tests, if the Imnam Dam collapses, most of the increased water will be stored in the Peace Dam, and the rest will be stored in Paro Lake, which is in front of the Hwacheon Dam, south of Peace Dam," said Cheon Byung-Sung, director of water resources at the ministry. "There is no reason to worry about a possible flood triggered by a collapse of the North Korean dam," he said.

In 1986, the South Korean government of President Chun Doo-Hwan announced that North Korea was preparing a "water attack" that could sweep away the northern part of the country, causing huge casualties.

North Korea was "secretly" building the Imnam Dam to hold as much as 20 billion tons of water, which could be used to engulf South Korea, the government said at the time. Construction began in February 1987, initially funded at 63 billion Won ($60 million).

But the announcement was later dismissed as an anti-communist ploy designed to overcome Chun's political crisis, and construction on the dam came to a halt in 1990. In 1993, the Board of Audit and Inspection under President Kim Young-Sam's government found that the flood threat was "absurdly bloated."

The actual North Korean reservoir also turned out to be 2.62 billion tons, less than one-eighth the Chun government's claim.

But construction resumed after satellite photographs in 2002 found that the Imnam dam was eroding, triggering fears that it would rupture in case of heavy rains.

Possible water release from the North's dam has long been a source of security fears in the South, which faces lingering threats from its communist neighbor.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage? That's not a great deal of damage is it? A suburb cul-de-sac worth of Texas homes maybe?

__________________
2009 ML350 (106K) - Family vehicle
2001 CLK430 Cabriolet (80K) - Wife's car
2005 BMW 645CI (138K) - My daily driver
2016 Mustang (32K) - Daughter's car

rural hovels are not worth much...

__________________
Proud owner of ....
1971 280SE W108
1979 300SD W116
1983 300D W123
1975 Ironhead Sportster chopper
1987 GMC 3/4 ton 4X4 Diesel
1989 Honda Civic (Heavily modified)
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Section 609 MVAC Certified
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"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Howdy All,
It is interesting what people can think up to attack their enemies with.

__________________
Frank X. Morris
17 Kia Niro
08 Jeep Wrangler 4 door unlimited

That Ill chong Ill is one ill mo-fo, all right. Too bad he's got Seoul in his sights so thoroughly. Makes it tough to jump him.

__________________
1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

It's not as if the allies ever engaged in such underhanded tactics.

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

True... we only poisoned the fields and jungles of Vietnam because natives of that land were trying to hide under forest cover from fiery death from the sky.

That'll teach 'em.

__________________
1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

I believe that dam is on the North Han. The Han runs through Seoul (pop approx 10 million); not exactly rural hovels.

__________________
Never a dull moment at Berry Hill Farm.

In which case the Hundreds of thousands of dollars damage quote would be an obvious typo.....

__________________
Proud owner of ....
1971 280SE W108
1979 300SD W116
1983 300D W123
1975 Ironhead Sportster chopper
1987 GMC 3/4 ton 4X4 Diesel
1989 Honda Civic (Heavily modified)
---------------------
Section 609 MVAC Certified
---------------------
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

So that's what the lefties mean when they say they want to stop the dam war! Now it finally makes sense!

Bot

The allies fibbed when they promised NK an Old Country Buffet in lieu of rice.

poor North Korea boo hoo

There Will Be Floods

By ALEX PRUD’HOMME
Published: February 27, 2008

LAST month, a 30-foot section of levee ruptured in Fernley, Nev. While the cause of the breach, which swamped 450 homes and forced dozens of people to evacuate, is unknown, anyone familiar with the drowning of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina will tell you this: Levees fail.
Indeed, there are more than 100 antiquated earthen berms across the country in danger of collapsing. What happened in Nevada is a harbinger of a much larger problem nationwide.

In Texas City, Tex., for instance, levees protect 50,000 residents and $6 billion worth of property, including almost 5 percent of the nation’s oil-refining capacity. Imagine the consequences, in this day of $100-a-barrel oil, if those defenses fail.

Even more vulnerable are the 1,100 miles of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, north of San Francisco. Cobbled together 150 years ago to provide farmland, they are now part of an intricate, fragile system that supplies fresh water to California, the eighth-largest economy in the world.

On a recent visit, I noticed that the water had risen nearly to the top of the levee on one side, while the land had subsided at least 30 feet below on the other side. The water pressure against the decrepit berm was palpable. Should the levee crack, be overtopped by a storm or liquefied by an earthquake, saltwater will surge inland, destroying lives, perhaps flooding Sacramento and paralyzing California.

A year ago the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which builds and maintains many of these levees, admitted that 122 are at risk of failure. California, with 37 at-risk levees, and Washington State, with 19, are the worst off. But the list includes levees near Albuquerque, Detroit, Hartford, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Omaha and Washington.

These levees were designed poorly and built of whatever material was close at hand — clay, soft soil, sand mixed with seashells. Tree roots, shifting stones and rodents weaken them further. The land the berms are built on often subsides, while the waters they restrain constantly probe for weak spots.

Sadly, America’s flood-protection system has long been undermined by bureaucratic turf wars, chronic underfinancing by Congress and a lack of political leadership. The heart of the problem is the Corps of Engineers, which Congress has “streamlined” relentlessly for decades, imperiling its mission through budget cuts and neglect. The Corps has a good set of engineering guidelines for levees, but it doesn’t always follow them. Now largely staffed by civilians, the Corps has a backlog of projects it does not have the money to accomplish.

Business has also ignored the levee problem. Developers, abetted by the Supreme Court’s vague 2006 ruling on the Clean Water Act, have rushed to fill in wetlands and build in floodplains.

But water is an inexorable force that, sooner or later, will assert itself. This is a lesson others have taken to heart. In 1953, a hurricane in the North Sea breached dikes and flooded the Netherlands, setting off a period of national soul-searching. Realizing that they had suffered from poor engineering and communication, the Dutch spent billions of dollars to create a world-class flood control system and are now armed for a once-in-10,000-year event.

The United States isn’t even prepared for a once-in-100-year event. In light of climate change, we need to emulate the Netherlands and make flood protection a national priority.

For starters, we need to reinvigorate the Army Corps of Engineers and give it a mandate to build and maintain a coherent, robust, nationwide flood protection system — as opposed to the ineffective, piecemeal measures that failed so catastrophically in New Orleans.

Second, the laws stemming from the 1928 Flood Protection Act, which immunize the Corps from prosecution when its levees fail, must be repealed. Already, the Corps has quietly begun to decertify some of its levees, effectively abdicating responsibility when disaster strikes.

And finally, citizens and businesses who benefit from levees should apply their skills and resources to their upkeep. For years, we have relied on dredging, bulldozing and building ever-taller walls to control nature. Instead, the Corps should work with other government agencies, businesses, scientists and environmental groups to develop a greener, more intelligent system that integrates traditional engineering with natural defenses like wetlands, islands and reeds. Such an approach will be costly and require maintenance, but will prove far more effective than our current methods.

The need to eliminate dangerous levees gives Congress the chance to rethink land and water use, and how they are connected. We should integrate nature and technology, build only in areas that can be adequately protected and allow some wetlands to return to their naturally unconstrained state. After all, experts say, there are only two types of levees: those that have failed, and those that will fail. If we have learned anything from Hurricane Katrina, it’s that we cannot simply wish natural flooding away.

Alex Prud’homme, the co-author with Julia Child of “My Life in France,” is writing a book about water.

In Kentucky, they had to lower Cumberland lake over 100 feet to do some work on the dam. Played heck with tourism, but the bloody thing was looking like it would acyually let go.