hankyoreh

the world’s one and only military dam.

By Noh Hyung-woong, staff reporter

Even the diesel sport utility truck has trouble once it gets to the rugged terrain of Haesan Ridge, located 700 meters above sea level and about an hour and a half by car from Chuncheon, capital of Gangwon province. On the other side of the winding road is something that sticks out like a sore thumb in the natural landscape: a 125-meter-high concrete structure, completely filling the pass between two mountains. It’s the Peace Dam, the world’s one and only military dam.

When the Hankyoreh visited the dam on July 8, it was blocking off what amounted to little more than a creek on the upper North Han River. It was built in one stage in 1989 for 150.6 billion won, including 63.9 billion won in donations from the public. The Peace Dam is solely intended to manage floodwaters released from North Korea’s Kumgangsan Dam and has no power generation or sluice gate capabilities. Citizens were galvanized into contributing in 1987 after the results of experiments showed a discharge from the North Korean dam potentially reaching half the height of Seoul’s 63 Building. But the Fifth Republic hearings in 1988 under the Roh Tae-woo administration showed the project to be something of a con.

In 2005, the Roh Moo-hyun administration put 232.9 billion (US$194 million) into reinforcing the dam after talk about a possible collapse of the Kumgangsan Dam led to a renewed focus on flood management capabilities. The new effort involved increasing its height from 80 meters to 125 meters and using concrete to bolster its rock northern face. This, it was believed, would be enough to withstand a collapse of the North Korean dam and once-in-200-years rainfall conditions.

The administration claimed that the new facilities were safe under any conditions. Now, the Peace Dam is the subject of renewed controversy with the Lee Myung-bak administration’s plans to invest another 165 billion won (US$144 million) in it. After reaching a decision last year, the Ministry of Land Transport and Maritime Affairs plans to began a second reinforcement effort in September, adding concrete to the southern face as part of a push to increase dam flood control capabilities through 2014. The goal is to fit the dam to withstand both a collapse of the Kumgangsan Dam and conditions of “probable maximum precipitation.”

But critics are saying the effort is unlikely to justify its cost. Their argument is that there is no reason to pour enormous sums into the dam less than a decade after the initial reinforcement.

To begin with, they are saying it is unlikely that both the precipitation or dam collapse scenarios will occur. The maximum precipitation is just that: a maximum foreseeable rainfall. Meteorologists said this scenario would involve literally all the water vapor in the atmosphere coming down as rain.

“We have often seen conditions approximating maximum precipitation in recent years due to climate change, but the odds against the Kumgangsan Dam also collapsing are quite simply astronomical,” said Lee Chul-jae, head of the Korean Federation For Environmental Movement’s green policy team.

Environmental groups are contending that the project was intended to benefit construction companies. Daelim was in charge of the initial construction and reinforcement for the dam, while no company has yet been selected for the new reinforcement.

Some said that even if safety dictates applying the standard of maximum precipitation, this should have done during the first reinforcement in 2005. By waiting another seven years, they argued, the government used more money than necessary. The quarry for aggregate has to be opened up again after its restoration, and the concrete mixing facilities that were taken down now have to be rebuilt.

Experts in dam design said the current safety standards are contradictory. With a more than six-meter-high road tunnel midway along the ridge next to the dam, water pouring into the hinterland after it tops out could result in instability in its base.

“The tunnel doesn’t even have a track for guiding out water that pours over into the back,” said one dam design expert. “It makes no sense to claim that another layer of concrete is enough to withstand maximum precipitation conditions while doing nothing about that.”

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