Vietnam’s Mekong Delta is facing long-term dangers as China’s hydroelectric dams in recent weeks have released billions of cubic meters of water, causing the Mekong river to rise to a record high during the dry season.
According to the report of the International Mekong River Commission (MRC) and the Mekong Dam Monitoring (MDM) project of the Stimson Center and the US’s Eye on Earth Project, many measuring stations on the Mekong River have recorded a continuous increase in water level in the past week. Specifically, at two measuring stations in Chiang Khan (Thailand) and Vientiane (Laos), the water level at these two stations is about 2.37 m higher than the average level for many years and is considered abnormal.
According to MDM, since March 1, the discharge of water in China has raised the river level in Thailand by more than 1.5 meters. From March 7 to 13, China’s Noa Zhuodu and Xiaowan dams alone released a total of two billion cubic meters of water, much higher than the one billion cubic meters of water in the previous weeks.
MDM predicts that until the end of June, dams on the upper Mekong will continue to release water at the same high level as last week and possibly larger, raising river levels downstream.
Vietnam’s Thanh Nien newspaper interviewed a number of people in the Mekong Delta and experts and was told that the river level was high this year in Vietnam but not red because of the lack of silt, affecting the productivity of the local orchards.
Thanh Nien newspaper quoted Master Nguyen Huu Thien, an expert on the ecology of the Mekong Delta, as saying: The activities of storing water in the flood season and discharging it to generate electricity in the dry season of Mekong hydropower dams can help reduce coastal drought and salinity in the Mekong Delta in normal years. However, in the long term, Mr. Thien said that the long-term consequences of upstream hydroelectric dams storing water in the rainy season and massively releasing water in the dry season as in the past time will cause the Mekong Delta’s land to become degraded quickly, riverbank and coastal erosion will increase over time.
Translated by Thoibao.de from RFA: https://www.rfa.org/vietnamese/news/vietnamnews/china-s-dams-released-bil-of-cubic-metter-water-posing-threat-to-vn-mekong-delta-03222022075412.html
