Sign Utah Electrical Services Contract Later

Document type sign electrical services contract utah later

[Music] uh good evening to viewers in asia and good afternoon and morning in europe and america i'm gwen robinson president of the foreign correspondence club of thailand and tonight we're bringing you this webcast uh hosted by the fcct on behalf of international rivers and partner organizations uh as you all know if you've tuned in uh we're marking the two-year anniversary of the tragic laos damn disaster the collapse of the uh championship nam noi uh dams and how two years on the call for justice persists and people are still facing hardship and uh lack of compensation or recognition on july 23 2018 at least 70 people died or disappeared and over 7 000 were displaced when a dam collapsed in southern laos with little prior warning a rushing wall of water inundated homes families and entire villages downstream in atapu province the flood waters extended far downstream and thousands of people across the border in cambodia also saw their homes their land and belongings damaged by the rising waters two years later those affected are yet to see justice the shapian shea nam noi project is now operational and exporting electricity to thailand thousands of people who lost family members homes land and livelihoods in the tragedy remain in very difficult conditions and are yet to see answers regarding the collapse or full remediation despite efforts by u.n human rights experts concerned civil society and many many others the public lacks transparent information on the courses of the collapse steps to ensure the future safety of the structure and plans to adequately compensate losses and harm and fully restore the livelihoods of these affected people today's very important panel discussion will explore continued efforts to seek answers and hold responsible actors to account the event overall is co-organized by international rivers with mekong watch inclusive development international fair finance thailand and the korean civil society task force team for the shapian shenamnoy dam collapse of course with the support of the fcct i'd like to introduce our expert speakers tonight before i introduce a short video we will show we have philip alston the former u.n special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights richard meehan dam engineering and safety expert surreni who is the director of sai forest and thai fair finance network and eliot yay ahn park who is with the korean civil society task force team in response to the shea bianche num noi dam collapse before we move to a what promises to be a fascinating and important discussion i would just like to introduce the very short video we are about to see and also invite all viewers to ask questions over our facebook page uh you'll see a slot for comments and questions on the side and these will be addressed later by the moderator who is taking over from me shortly i'll introduce him at the end so first uh the video it's a mekong watch video developed by the ngo mekong watch to illustrate the devastating impact of the dam collapse on the people in the area who had previously relied on the landon river for their survival two years later as i've said their futures remain uncertain and their strength as self-reliant communities is undermined this film also identifies the project's international shareholders and financiers of their of the dam project and their responsibilities with respect to restoration of people's livelihoods and the surrounding environment so without further ado we will turn to the video and after that uh the fcct vice president jonathan head will join us to moderate the discussion so uh please post your questions any time from now over to our excellent uh technical wizard david foster and jayanne media who is going to handle the video and the rest of the broadcast thank you [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay [Music] foreign foreign [Music] foreign foreign [Music] so again [Music] so [Music] hello again um after that very sobering take that puts uh puts it all into perspective um i'd like to turn to our first speaker and at some point i will hand over to our moderator jonathan head who is just uh having some technical issues so uh to turn to you first uh philip you were u.n special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and i'm sure you've got a lot to say about this so over to you uh thanks very much uh gwen um i it's a privilege to be able to speak on this panel as some will know i undertook a visit to the lao people's democratic republic in march of last year and one of the the the role of a un special rapporteur is to ensure some form of accountability for governments all around the world we visit um all countries but we do require an invitation from the government the lao government agreed to the visit but immediately there was a major stumbling block which is that when i indicated i would like to visit the area around the dam the government said no that's impossible it's not safe and i got back to say that i knew that many other people had been there and that i too should be permitted to go there at which point i was told no it's a national security issue you can't go there a rather lengthy negotiation ensued and i indicated that the mission would not be viable or meaningful if such a trip was not permitted and the government fortunately acquiesced i went and met with the many of the displaced villagers i saw the flooded villages and of course i spoke to a great many other people who have worked on this project the details of what has happened and what has not happened subsequent to the disaster are fairly well known thanks mainly to the sponsors of this webinar and i won't go over those except to say that there are still thousands of people who are uh resettled in entirely unsatisfactory conditions uh i spoke to uh a good number of them and got a sense of the deep frustration a sense of the complete lack of information that they were given and a sense of a totally uncertain future although when we say uncertain future that's because the government keeps promising that things are going to happen but there is very much a sense that these are forgotten people that the government doesn't actually care what you have is a government that is totally non-transparent that does not permit any form of political participation that imposes very steep penalties on those who raise critical issues and it's a government that has combined a strategy of traditional authoritarianism with almost rampant capitalism uh that capitalism has involved giving concessions uh particularly to foreign economic interests in relation to a wide range of different issues when it comes to hydroelectric power what is most shocking is that the returns on all the investment and all the long-term debt that has been assumed to the national budget are absolutely minimal there is a long-term hope that returns will be significantly greater but of course the failure to undertake a thorough and published investigation of what happened in this particular case uh should raise questions in relation to the dozens of other dams that the government has already built or is planning to build so there's not just the human rights dimension that one should be looking very carefully at what happened but there is also the uh dimension of economic prudence to really establish what happened and to make the necessary adjustments in the overall system in terms of the people who have been displaced this is a response that is completely lacking in any form of accountability the government of course has pointed the finger at the private actors and we will hear today from the groups in korea who have been working to try to establish accountability for one of the key private actors and we'll hear how unsatisfactory that has been but for its own part the government has really been completely unaccountable uh the officials with whom i met when i was there gave very optimistic assessments of what was happening on the ground of the fate of the people who had been displaced and none of that matched in any way the reality that i ascertained for myself the staggering thing is that the numbers involved in this actual displacement are relatively small 7 000 people and a a fairly generous package could easily have been put together particularly given the amount of very significant foreign assistance that was made available precisely for that purpose but instead the government has chosen the path of inaction basically it has not done what would be expected of a government in this sort of situation the people have been condemned to a miserable existence where they're being fed as though they were in a zoo they're being promised arable land but the sort of lands that have been made available to the best of my knowledge turned out to be completely unsuitable unsatisfactory and it's a very bad situation let me then engage in a little bit of self-criticism uh the united nations system obviously cannot compel any government the australian government where i come from the united states government where i live or the government of the lao people's republic to [Music] do what it doesn't want to do but the human rights system should be able to focus attention should be able to mobilize public opinion in some way in this case the system has in principle worked as it should i produced two detailed reports an end of mission statement followed by an official report to the human rights council all of which documented this comprehensively in the absence of any serious steps in the intervening year or more a group of special rapporteurs then sent a complaint letter to the government and to the key corporations in april of this year again very little response it's been very difficult to get media attention for anything related to [Music] lao certainly the human rights issues are pretty much off the agenda uh most of the partners whether corporate or diplomatic are very reluctant to speak out critically because the government cracks down so hard and takes a basically punitive approach but that sort of cowardice is deeply regrettable and it means that the victims in this case and the victims in cases that will almost certainly follow because no effective remedial steps have been taken are simply left to fend for themselves and that's a tragedy it's even more tragic in a country which has seen record levels of economic growth uh for many years which has immense natural resources and huge potential to develop and to provide a good standard of living for all of its people uh that is not being done uh very little money is being spent on what i would call social protection for the poorer members of the society uh there is a systematic uh deprivation of access to land for many people turning that land over to often foreign interests in terms of agriculture in terms of hydropower and again the tragedy is that the un human rights system has not succeeded in shining more attention or drawing more attention to this situation so two years after the collapse let me just express my deep sympathy for obviously those who died the 71 people but equally for the 7 000 people who are displaced and who remain in a completely unsatisfactory situation and i would hope that the international community would not simply let this anniversary pass but would resolve to see what they can do to bring about a much more satisfactory outcome thank you um thank you very much phillip for that very sobering update uh and uh i'm sure elliot uh who is uh coming next and speaking for the korean civil society task force team on the damn collapse um has uh further insight and uh let's mention please uh to all viewers do post some questions on facebook if you want and we'll turn to those later so elliot over to you thank you it is an honor to join the respectable partner tonight and the viewers who's with us at the moment um my name is elliot park and i am here today as a member of korean civil society task force team and as gwen kindly introduced were a coalition of seven korean civil society organization with various backgrounds and it seems that my powerpoint is not going up but i will yes there okay all right so so today i would like to focus my presentation on the complaint submitted to korean ncp so on june 28th of 2019 the korean civil society task force team submitted a complaint to the korean oecd national contact point it is an independent oversight body established by the korean government to promote the oecd guidelines for multinational enterprises and regarding the collapse of a settled md built for sapiens cinema reservoir that collapsed and as um phillip said it is pretty much the only official gravest mechanism that we could take advantage of in the case where the the actors are business actors and financial actors from various countries and and the project itself happened overseas so the guidelines are a set of voluntary and non-binding recommendations aimed at minimizing the adverse impact from the activities of multinational enterprises and encouraging them to fulfill social responsibilities and to respect human rights in host countries while promoting international investment the complaint that we submitted presented multiple violations of human rights environmental and disclosure provisions of the guidelines that was committed by sk engineering and construction korea western power company and the export import bank of korea the complaint also argued the faulty design and poor construction of the dam structure i'm sure professor mian has a lot more insight to add to that and also the lack of contingency plans in case of the dam collapse and the respondent's refusal to meet with civil groups or to disclose any relevant information as requested by us as for the export import bank of korea we argued in our complaint that among others the guidelines should also apply to the export import bank of korea as it profited also from signing a commercial contract to provide financial consulting services in relation to this project okay so in compliance with the procedural guidance in the guidelines the korean ncp made an initial assessment when this specific instance was received the initial assessment is a process which determines whether the issue raised is a bona fide in is relevant to the implementation of the guidelines and if the ncp determines that it warrants a it is a bona fide issue then it offers good office so the korean ncp ncp after reviewing the six factors that should be considered in the initial assessment determined that tncp would offer good offices for this case because after reviewing the complaint the issues raised in the complaint it deemed are material and substantiated and because the kncp thought that it could contribute in serving the purpose and effectiveness of the guidelines by facilitating a resolution through negotiations and the good offices however the kncp dismissed the export-import bank of korea as party to the ncp procedure referencing its evaluation in similar cases in the past that the guidelines are not applicable to official development aid projects for an entity that is regulated nationally by special legislation and for which special arrangements exist within the oecd for the purpose of achieving national policy goals such as the export-import bank of korea then the guidelines do not apply so on july 23rd of 2020 exactly two years after the tragic damn collapse destroyed lives of so many innocent people in the area the korean ncp issued a final statement which effectively ended the official grievance mechanism by the ncp in its statement the kncp explained that no arrangement was no agreement was reached because both s-k-e-n-c and korea western power company have refused to participate in the ncp procedure the kncp kept emphasizing that the ncp procedure is not to determine whether the respondent has violated the guidelines or guidelines or not but to determine whether the ncp can help the parties involved resolve the conflict by offering its good offices for dialogue so basically limiting its role only as contacting the parties to see if the parties are willing to participate in the process of good offices to discuss with each other to reach a mutually acceptable agreement so in effect it removed itself from doing anything tangible an effective and efficient to bring the parties together which is is indispensable in this case because the parties often are unwilling especially the business actors and oftentimes they claim that they have observed all the local laws and regulations and that there is no need for them to answer to any responsibilities that's not determined under the law the kncp made several recommendations at the end of its statement urging the respondents to establish communication channels with the complainants for continued discussion and to implement an internal system within these business actors to promote the fulfillment of corporate responsibility and to submit a performance evaluation report back to kncp after six months of the statement that was pretty much the only kids if i can express it that way for this statement to have but in effect it was just the words that does not have any power to force the parties to to do anything so the korean civil society task force team was deeply disappointed of course by the case of his final statement and the lack of genuine and effective efforts to actually bring the respondents to the table to engage in meaningful dialogue that will provide full compensation for the losses and harm suffered by the victims and are continuing to to suffer in response to the key and sufficient final statement the korean civil society task force team issued this statement the next day urging skenc to provide transparent and credible claims process for redress and rehabilitation and to take substantial measures to reinforce the structural integrity of the entire dam complex also as the sapiens and hydropower project was a public private partnership which was financed by economic development cooperation fund of korea we are we did we urged the korean government to establish concrete measures to prevent similar man-made disasters from happening in the future among others we urge the government of korea to make the application of the safeguard mandatory to all aids and development assistances and that it should ensure transparent execution of edcf project and should establish reliable and independent accountability and given mechanism to guarantee the right to remedy civil society organizations monitoring the dam collapse have repeatedly sought to engage the business stakeholders involved in this project by seeking responses to letters and by providing opportunities to engage in dialogues however it is more than disappointing that we have received only very limited responses from the stakeholders so far we welcome the news that skenc has agreed with loud government and compensation package but we will continue to monitor the funds allocation and disseminate dissemination to each affected village and we urge the government of korea to strengthen the workings of korean ncp to turn it from a paper tiger to a genuinely effective way of ensuring human rights violations to ensure human rights in business settings our hurt goes out to all those suffered you know who are still suffering and it is very disappointing and i am very sorry to convey that the only official griffith mechanism that we could rely on proved to be ineffective but we are hoping for the better future and we will continue to work with this international organ csos and other member organizations to bring meaningful changes thank you for having me okay everybody i think uh if it's okay i better introduce myself uh i'm jonathan heads the bbc southeast asia correspondent here in bangkok uh sorry for being late my colleague gwen thankfully stepped into the breach and i had to quickly deal with something else so i will be moderating from now on uh on this really very important subject um a welcome to all of you and our distinguished speakers and thank you very much elliot for that perspective on your attempts to get some kind of accountability in korea and korea is such a huge investor in this region that that is a very very important process uh for for ensuring just justice accountability in business i'd like to throw the floor over over now to sauroni uh obviously you can give a slightly broader more regional perspective in particular here in thailand we must always be cognizant of the fact that thailand is both on the largest customers and investors in dams in laos over to you yes thank you uh hi jonathan and everyone um it's my honor to be on the panel and also hello to uh the viewers at home um so i represent fair finance thailand we're a network of five organizations who share a common interest in promoting sustainable banking here in thailand so basically our member organizations include south forest it's a research company international rivers earth ecological recovery in law foundation who specializes in community rights as well as a consumer foundation for consumers who is the largest consumer group in thailand so uh involvement with the sapiency name i think it's very sobering to hear the previous speakers talk about their uh long i think attempts to to try to find um measure of accountability so in comparison our journey has really just begun very recently late last year we as a network published a case study um on the say yaburi dam which is another large dam in in laos that also is being built with a money from thai lenders as well as a case of sapience and noise so for those of you who are interested can download our case study from the fairfinance thailand.org website in regards to the two year uh as philip mentioned um we have we are trying to follow up with the letter uh from the u.n working group to uh the respective banks there are four as you can see from the video shown at the beginning there are four lenders involved one of which is a government-owned bank the exit bank but the other three banks are all private banks there are gun tai bank tanasha bank and the uh the bank of utah so we on the eve of the second year anniversary uh so just last friday the 23rd of july we sent an open letter to the bank of thailand as well as to each of the four banks to follow up and to try to get them to respond to the un working group letter so it's been more than almost three months already and so far only gung thai bank responded to the u.n working group and we are quite disappointed actually by the response of guntai bank because it doesn't really reflect that the bank will do more it doesn't show that the ban will do more to try to find um effective remedy for the affected villagers so um i think gung thai bank's stance uh pretty much echoes what i think many banks in thailand uh right now um seem to uh to to view this incident uh so they think uh this damn collapse as being um you know an accident that no one uh wanted to happen and they see that the banks are not directly responsible and they therefore they don't see that this is some this is an incident where you know it could it should lead to better uh grievance mechanisms or any kind of effective um remedy and in terms of remedy um the banks i think it it was in the news also for some time including rad which is the um the thai company who's also a shareholder in the project company so two years ago all the banks um when we saw news about this they donated money so they said they tried to send some uh compensation in terms of but it's more like seen as a kind of uh csi um you know and a lot of them try to give it through the laos government so i think the uh position the stance of the banks pretty much is that we have done you know this is regrettable you know it's a regrettable incident we have done uh all that we can in terms of helping to alleviate uh to help those affected uh but they don't see it as a systemic um issue or uh you know an instance where that calls for better management of est risk or they don't see it as a call to press the project company for better remedy or to follow up with um with the affected villagers so so we think that there is still a lot of work to be done so in our letter to the bank of thailand and the banks we also sent the letter a copy to the thai bankers association because the thai banker association last august so in august 2019 issued a public document called the sustainable banking guidelines on responsible lending and that's actually been signed by all of their members so exim bank is actually not part of the association as they are a specialized government bank but all the other private banks signed this document and it actually spelled out very clearly that um the banks will um commit to improving their esg the environmental social and governance issues in that operation it states very clearly that the banks will engage with stakeholders beyond their shareholders including stakeholders that have been materially negatively affected and we think that sapient uh case is uh clearly a litmus test so to speak of how serious our banks are with the guidelines so we think that at the very least all the banks um should respond to the un working group letter and they should definitely engage with their project client as a client to um to implement better remedy to to those affected so we think that if you know since all the banks signed these guidelines um then it's time to uh basically put their money uh uh you know with what they what to what they say so to speak so to be very serious about um implementing um another uh i would say small maybe small um move but could be significant is that a few thai banks have already announced that they would adopt the u.n guiding principles on business and human rights so the lenders of sapience and illinois none of them express this commitment very clearly actually all the private banks say that we adhere to the human rights but they don't really spell out the principles but one bank uh in the lending group the tanacha bank is being merged with another big bank in thailand the thai military bank or tmb and tmb actually uh based on the finance assessments um of the policies last year actually came highest in uh scoring so they showed the most kind of improvement so we are also hoping to engage with tmb as well as a kind of amalgam of the the new entity that's going to be including tanacha bank uh tnb is one of the few thai banks that publicly announced that they would adopt un guiding principles on business and human rights have already expressed that they would establish grievance mechanisms from the for the affected stakeholders of their clients so so in the coming days and months we're hoping to engage with um bank of thailand uh more more more clearly on on you know how we see this case as a test of um the responsible lending guidelines because otherwise it would just be a piece of paper that you know that that doesn't lead to any real change in the bank's operation um i think another development that could be worth mentioning is that thailand as many of you might know uh also announced the national action plan on business and human rights uh last november so the government actually went to geneva and presented this so and in the content it actually mentions um cross-border investments as one of the key areas that the government have to improve uh the oversight and also mentions the the security exchange commission the sec who regulates the stock market as a key regulator to implement uh rules regarding the un guiding principles including the relevant complaints mechanisms and and disclosures so um since all these uh three of the four lenders uh who financed sapience and m9 are listed companies uh in thailand so we're hoping for uh potential to engage with the sec on this issue as well because the sec right now as part of the uh their work our national action plan are uh studying um you know how to improve um disclosures on human rights as well as the re as related tools and guidance uh documents that they are planning to announce so we're hoping to raise this case to bring this case as an example as well of what listed companies should be doing thank you very much serenity um obviously thailand's role again crucial um very interesting to hear the growing awareness of the need to show corporate social responsibility among thai banks and other companies um richard me and i think we've got you back we lost you for a moment um if you're there and you can speak to us we've been very grateful now to hear the engineers perspective in particular the things that you found out from your study of what happened at jp dam and perhaps some lessons for other dams as well okay uh thank you very much um this is a great uh opportunity i've read many of the things that the other participants in the panel have written and i've been very impressed and it's really great to be part of this uh of this group uh i'd like to start off by giving a little background about how i uh became involved in the study of the failure of the zpian zenonoi uh project um uh i first set foot in thailand in september of 1963. uh i was following in the footsteps of a famous uh thai engineer uh named kun sukhumvit uh was uh the first graduate of uh mit uh thai graduate of mit and he came back to thailand in the 1950s and he uh carried out some remarkable projects including the road tsukunvit that we all know that stretched from bangkok to the cambodian border and also even more significantly the meteor pop highway which goes from uh saraberi up into isan which used to be accessible mainly by railroad and oxcart in the old days so mr zukovitz's efforts were designed to connect the central part of thailand with the northeast with isan and in particular with the the the what's called the dangrak escarpment which is a very rugged mountain chain that runs all the way from karate to surin to sisakat to the famous uh contested uh wihan and then terminates in a last fragment on the boulevard plateau in laos which is the setting for the failure that occurred that i'm going to discuss here my job when i came here in 1963 i was a young engineer just out of the uh the army uh was to try to help design and build a dam uh in terrain uh in karat province mountainous terrain between quran and bangkok it was very very similar to the conditions in the boulevard plateau and this was a quite a a jarring experience for me because i had some military construction experience but i really didn't know very much about dam building and uh and i and and the group of thai engineers who went up there to build this project which was a pretty good size project similar to the uh zpn project uh didn't have a a lot of experience and it wasn't long before we ran into some real problems and this was very unsettling for a young engineer 22 23 years old to be designing a project that you had to worry was going to fail and um we actually did have the beginning of a failure and the failure was not in the dam itself but it was in the ground under the dam and from that uh i learned that if you don't have good ground to build your dam on then you're uh in deep trouble so when the uh uh the zpian uh zenominoi saddle damd failed a couple of years ago i was immediately interested in that because i recognized that the setting of the dam was very similar to the one that i had worked on back when i was a young engineer and i thought i might have something useful to contribute to the reason for it and i was very encouraged because the prime minister of laos very soon issued a call and said that he wanted international community of engineers and experts to assist in trying to figure out in a very transparent way what had happened at zp and xenomorph this very clear statement and very encouraging and um so i uh went up to vientiane and i knocked on doors of offices i went to the power company i went to the ministry of mines uh expecting uh to be able to access information about what had happened and although the lovely people by and large that uh that i i met up there were very polite to me uh they would go back into the back office and then return and say well uh not now you you cannot see any information right now now that was two years ago and the remarkable thing to me is that all of the information about that project the design information uh the operation information up to the time of failure has been kept in complete uh secrecy ever since then and uh uh i'm just not used to that sort of thing and i uh it it still troubles me that even t e international uh expert panel that the uh allow government put together to investigate the cause of the failure as part of their contract they were sworn to secrecy and that report has remained secret uh ever since but since i did have a little background on the subject and i was fascinated by the whole thing i thought well maybe i can do my own diagnosis because we have a lot of tools now that governments cannot control like satellite photographs and bits and pieces of of data they get filed away uh in obscure places and on the internet and so on and so forth and sure enough i found after a couple of months that i could find out quite a bit from satellite photos i could find quite a bit from casual photographs and information recorded by tourists who had accidentally wandered illegally into the dam site uh and best of all i could find from uh japanese files that the japanese uh quite a few years ago this project had been uh on the back burner for many many years and the japanese had done a study of the uh of the project uh back quite a few years ago uh meticulously done study japanese style uh wonderful uh professional work uh detailed and then filed away and uh and and basically disappeared from the public record uh i don't to this day know whether the designers of the final project as it was built uh even know about this this work that the japanese did certainly i i'm pretty sure that the work was never replicated but interestingly enough that the japanese studies uh included a study of the dam site the actual downside where the project was built and said there are going to be problems at this stamp site because the site is underlain by geology that is unstable uh and very leaky and uh and that this is going to be a problem um i'm going to show a series of slides now and the first one it is going to be a little bit offbeat uh it is uh what it appears to be and that is a it's a it's a it's a dessert that um i i took my wife out for an anniversary dinner about a year ago and uh to this nice restaurant we like here and uh she ordered this dessert and she took the first bite and i said to her um you know this is absolutely remarkable and i'm sure she thought that i was going to say something like that we've been married for 15 years or something like that and she said why and i said because this is exactly the situation uh this shows the situation at the bowl of venom plateau at the dam failure well i i don't i think she was happy to hear that but i want you to notice a couple of things about this notice that there's a high plateau-like uh configuration of cake here that's in in in layers and that on the top there's this uh chocolate that's been poured on and as i said to my wife at the time i said now if you're going to build a dam to hold water on the top of that cake you probably wouldn't want to build it on the chocolate would you okay so let me jump from that to a visualization of the bolovan plateau that i made using a technique i've tried to develop called texture mapping and this shows the ball of end plateau and if you think of it as a as a as a layered cake uh on the south side the near side uh with some uh chocolate-like sauce uh on the upper left uh what you're really seeing here is a layered uh uh series of sandstone and shale beds on the south side where the blue is which is the uh zp and z nominee reservoir but up to the left toward the uh town of of uh pakisong what you're seeing is lava this is a volcano not a mountain fuji type volcano but it's lava that has been uh issuing from little uh calderas uh little uh uh pimply like uh holes in the ground uh for a long long time and flowing over the top of that uh sedimentary rock and and and flowing down into the valley below and as you can see at uh uh the location of number one which is where the main dam is the the z uh zpnz project is built right at the interface of the point where that lava that chocolate sauce so to speak is uh is pushing up against the sandstone and this is the key to understanding what happened in this video all right uh this is another close-up textured map and number one is the main dam now the problem that the designers faced with the this project is they have a lot of rainfall on the top of this plateau and which is great because you can if you can collect that rainfall during july and august and september when most of it falls right now and hold it throughout the rest of the year you can then generate a smooth supply of electricity and send it to our bangkok shopping malls or whatever uh throughout the rest of the year but you have to be able to store that water and it's very hard to find uh anything more than a few cracks and hollows up in that country up there where you can store a lot of water so the engineers uh in order to get the storage requirement for the project they had to really push um the the the height of the dam to the point where the water started to spill over the edge of the plateau and in order to get that extra storage they need to make the project profitable they really had to raise that water as high as possible and the only way to do that was uh the main dam wasn't sufficient they had to push the storage so it came up and began to cover the purple area which is the lava basalt the chocolate so to speak that i showed on the first slide and the problem is as the japanese had pointed out to them many years ago is that lava is very unstable so there's a risk factor as soon as you raise the storage enough to make the project turn a profit you're pushing it to the point where you're getting into some dangerous ground and i knew about that because i had had the same problem in the 1960s in my own dam or the dam that i helped build here in thailand okay let's take a look in detail if you look down on the uh where it says failed saddle damn d you see there are three little little uh symbols that are that are meant to indicate slides that is land that has slid down uh into the valley and you'll notice that one of them actually is not even associated with the dam at all and the other two are independent slides that occurred on both sides now the point i'm going to make here is that although it is true that the dam failed what really happened is the land failed uh before the dam failed leaving the dam with no support so that the dam then simply washed away downstream and we'll see that in the next couple of slides now i want you to look uh at the other two dams shown here and that is saddle dam e in saddle damn f now settle damn d has been completely replaced and very wisely they moved that dam off the purple area off the chocolate sauce so to speak and moved it into the yellow which is much more stable ground shortly after the failure the power company announced that they were going to do the same thing with saddle dam e in saddle dam f because we know that at the time of the failure saddle damn e and saddle damn f had also started to fail and the only reason they didn't feel completely is because when when saddle dam d gave way the reservoir dropped down and there was no more pressure on saddle dams e and f uh i think i mentioned before that uh everyone said well uh saddle damn e and saddle damn f uh are just as dangerous as saddle damn d and the power company at one point uh announced that they were going to have to replace settle down e and saddled in f with concrete dams just as they did uh at fatal the saddle dam d however there is no alternative place to put a concrete dam at saddle dam e and saddle dam f like there is a saddle dmd so that that uh replacement never took place now shortly after the failure uh a drone video of the whole site uh surfaced uh the uh whoever produced it is uh not known it was quickly removed from the internet i suspect it was probably uh somebody who worked for the contractor but this gives you the picture of saddle dam d uh a few days after the failure and you'll you'll you'll notice that uh a prominent feature is this black rock that exists buried about 20 10 to 20 meters below the surface of the ground and that black rock is lava if you've ever seen pictures of lava flows in hawaii it looks very similar to this and that lava can can convey a tremendous amount of water uh it is full of uh huge cracks that you could put your fist in and you can put a whole stream into the lava and it will simply disappear and then reappear often as a waterfall uh miles away from the point where it goes into the ground so that lava is a is a powerful aquifer on top of that lava is a a crusty soil that is basically uh old rotten lava that is called laterite it's a red soil and you see there's a blank of it a blanket of that soil on top of the uh uh of the lava that's uh 20 meters under the dam 10 meters uh if you go downstream and even further down the river you can see this there's still a 10 meter uh ladder right uh blanket now this sets up a situation where if water is allowed to get into the lava under the foundation and then starts bubbling up and pressurizing the the red soil downstream from the dam that soil uh will become completely unstable and begin to slide into the canyon and you can see that there were three uh separate slides that occurred uh here uh one on the right abutment right abutment slide one on the left abutment slide and another one independent from the dam downstream and these slides occurred because the the black lava underneath was pressurized and uplifted the soil so the soil just broke apart like ice on a river in springtime and began to flow downhill and once that happened uh let me back up here a bit before the dam was ever built the situation looked like this and the the the arrows are mostly conveying water through the basalt which is the gray layer uh uh at the bottom the soil on top of the basalt is the red the laterite and even before the dam was built water that that rain water and there's two or three meters of rain that falls in this area would sink into the ground further up the canyon and disappear and travel as an underground stream under the canyon the dam originally they intended to to do something about strengthening the foundation under the dam but the plans were changed to save money and the dam was simply put on top of this soil layer and when the reservoir began to fill the water continued to go under the uh under the dam through this basalt aquifer and appear i surmise as springs and waterfalls downstream of the project as this water pressure is the reservoir uh raised or became higher on the dam in the last few days before the failure that water pressure increased and uplifted the soil which began to simply slide and float down into the canyon and this is looking only at the left abutment and you see there are the two distinctly different slides that develop there the last stage of the failure was the with the loss of support of the ground downstream of the dam the dam itself uh became unstable because there was nothing to keep it from simply joining the sliding movement and continuing uh down and this is basically uh what happened the day before the the day of the failure so uh to sum up my point that i'm making here is we had at number two the failed saddle dam and that having failed that has now been replaced by the replacement saddle dam which is at number five which is built not on the purple uh weak uh basalt but on better rock but saddle dams e and f which had already started to fail um have not been replaced and now they are trying to put the project back into operation they say that it is complete but i raised the question of why can it be considered complete if those two other saddle dams haven't been replaced it's true the korean contractor has done some work dumping some rock downstream uh of the dam to try to stabilize the slopes but this uh this measure is has not been uh approved by even the law government's consultants something done independently by the korean contractor and i think there's a serious question as to whether it's going to be effective when and if the uh reservoir fills again and the water encroaches on saddle dams e and f so i would say that the future of this project is very is very uncertain i think i've taken enough time thanks very much thanks very much richard um just before we just throw the floor open to questions very quickly just to clarify one a conclusion for what you were saying are you stating that that location is simply not an appropriate place to be building a dam or that you it could be done but simply needs to be done differently i think um well that's a good question uh it would have been a much more uh expensive project because uh i think you would have had to have taken all of that uh red ladder right uh out and built the dam on something more more solid uh and i think that would have caused the cost of the project to uh it's a billion dollar project and uh i can easily imagine that the price could have gone up uh you know half again uh as much so thanks very much listen i've got another question from an audience member here this is actually for philip alston um one member has asked what you think it would take for the people who were affected by this disaster to get the help they need it's been two years uh promises were made is you know i have you found in your dealings with the lao government that there is a responsiveness there there are parts of it that want want things to be better what will help to get through that that you know or is it just com is it is it completely hopeless at the moment i mean two is a very long time uh i can't say that i have any grounds for optimism um there's a curious situation in the country where you have a a central government that is very detached from the stuff and is run in a very top-down manner so the likelihood of a mid-level official being able to move things in the absence of the leadership sending a message is quite low at the same time local authorities are actually very powerful in their own way and so if the local authorities have their own interests in other words they just want to protect the access of themselves and their friends to land uh and to the other resources they too have no incentive to and assist uh the victims um so i don't know what sort of political constellation needs to emerge my assumption is that international pressure is probably the only thing that is actually going to make a difference do you feel philip there's been enough of a priority made on this particular issue by international stakeholders and governments who've been engaging with laos uh laos is a real puzzle for me i remember doing an interview immediately after my mission with a journalist and the journalist said to me i told my uh my boss that i was going to meet with you and do something on the situation in laos and my boss looked at me and said why and i said what do you mean and he said well no one's interested in laos there's just not much happening there and i think that human rights groups have not done well by laos i don't think they're reporting i think they allow the um repressive approach of the government to prevent meaningful reporting i think they assume the population of seven million is too small that the number of chronic violations is limited and therefore they don't expose the much deeper set of problems so it's not getting the publicity that it should be getting thank you very much there's actually another question just come in serenity this one's directed to you and it's quite an interesting one about given what's happened um sepia nanoi um thai banks recalculating the risks they're exposed to in funding dams in laos i mean it's not just this it's also the controversies about whether these dams are viable whether you know there is the the the surplus of power i believe that's now coming out of loud dams is there a recalibration of risk by the time banks who are very important funders okay yes i think we we do see a slight change of attitude from thai banks i would say it's not necessarily from the sapien incident because as i said pretty much all the bankers that i know see this as an accident so to speak but it's mostly due to the rising uh alarm on the big project such as yapri and the i think attendant um research that for example there was one article in the new york times a ew months ago on the the dams being built in china and how that has affected um the water levels and downstream livelihoods so i think is those kinds of articles as well as rising i would say scrutiny on the banks lending activities in laos that is prompting them to i i would not say that they are re-evaluating the risk of financing in laos but i would say they are um taking more time um so to to to speak the next um last project that is um coming up in the pipeline would be the long prabang dam um and i think this is a one two to to look for whether the uh whether thai banks will still be involved uh we heard from one of the uh private banks the last private banks that they will not be participating um in in the loans although they they do mention that um as because all these financing have to be done as a as a syndication it's a syndicated loan so um they are kind of being asked by the other lenders of the previous projects why you know they are not so i think there are some i would say at this point we see some hesitation among thai banks um i don't think there's enough evidence for us to say that there has been improvements in terms of accounting for est risk in their due diligence in their project financing but i would say that they are taking a more cautious approach at this point in the uh damn financing but again i urge everyone um who's watching um as well as all the uh organizations involved to uh follow the bang them uh project because that that would be uh something that i mean if thai banks do decide to finance then that would be to us a very clear indication that they haven't really changed their view of eht risk yes thanks very much indeed um philip uh i've got one question here uh to you about the role of other developments in partner to call out their korean and thai counterparts and we you've talked about you know the lack of engagement with laos but it does seem that the governments of thailand and korea in on this particular issue do have a potentially useful role to play have you you know have you been able to get other governments to sort of recognize that they should be putting pressure perhaps on the thais and the koreans to take this issue more seriously is that a sort of indirect way of getting diplomatic pressure on the laos i have to say that when i met with government representatives um in vientiane but also in bangkok i found a remarkable reluctance to take a strong position even government to government i don't think there was a sufficient interest in the situation in laos generally on the part of those governments and so the only real focus was economic they wanted to be able to facilitate investment by their nationals they wanted to profit from the situation in laos and so they haven't been prepared to take any sort of strong position to pressure the government to change its practices and i think that is extremely disappointing because as i said earlier it would take so little effort to actually write this particular injustice thanks very much philip there is another question here this one's for elliot about south korea's reputation elliot after the the publicity that that was given to the the role of the korean engineering firm is there an awareness in the south korea or a sense that this disaster has damaged south korea's reputation of reputation of its great industrial companies and that among the public is their kind of pressure for korean companies to engage in a more responsible way with their investments in southeast asia well it seems that there there was a damage to their publicity in the beginning soon after right after the disaster has happened but in the end it seems unless the government really puts pressure on the companies to to to really respect the human rights obligations in doing the transnational overseas business projects there wasn't much public pressure per se from korean um population so in the beginning it was more on a humanitarian level people were empha sympathizing with the victims and the donations and and and the voluntary helps have been pouring in but we know that voluntary health or those helps on a social responsibility level doesn't really change the system itself but it is the government's determination to really help um hold the the involved parties responsible for this kind of disaster but because yes or does publicity help i mean is it could you do the korean media pick these things up because korea is a is a more accountable country than many others in this region and certainly public opinion has had a big impact on other issues do you sense that perhaps you could raise more awareness and get more pressure on the government to be more active we have been doing that um well you know for the past two years we've been doing a lot of publicity campaignings and also held a press conferences and all however it does seem that because south korea is pushing for the new south new southern policy that's focusing on um southeast asia the media does not really follow up with what's going on in laos and and how the the responsible parties are fulfilling their their um what they should do to really help these people the victim is to go back to their lives and it is very unfortunate that the media really quickly loses interest and move on to the new next issue but we will continue to raise issues and urge the media to to to stay focused and have interest in this issues well for the past two years the success has been limited in which is very unfortunate but we are looking forward to continuing our efforts such as by publishing the white book on all the information that we've gathered so far on this live issue and with the covet 19 it has been really limiting our um what we can do in terms of actually visiting the sites or um bringing the human side of the story but oftentimes this disaster happening in in relation to this huge project it's very complicated it's hard for the public to understand who's at fault because there are so many actors involved and we are trying to really break down the story so that people can see the human sides and the sufferings that are actually happening yeah thank you well as a journalist all i can say is guilty is charged when it comes to short-term interest in stories it is a constant problem um richard i've got a question for you that's coming and this is um a viewer who's asking whether you're going to have the same risk now every year every rainy season even with the repairs and the changes they've made to the dam um well i i've been following this this year interestingly it hasn't been a heavy rain here but they appear not to be allowing the reservoir to fill they've kept the water away from the dams and i can speculate optimistically that perhaps they recognize the problem themselves and they're they are preventing the reservoir from filling because they do intend to actually replace those dams but if they don't replace those dams uh my own view is that as soon as the reservoir fills completely and of course in order to meet the design requirements and generate the power that they uh would make the project profitable they have to fill the reservoir completely when the rain allows for it my own view is that it will be an extreme danger because those two dams were already starting to fail so i don't know what their plan is and i feel justified in speculating here to a certain degree because if the contractor and the investors and the law government keep everything secret then there's something wrong uh something is being hidden and uh i just don't think that that's that's right so that makes me uh adds to my suspicion and i think that this uh it may not fill at all this year it may be two or three years but when it does feel uh i think there's a good possibility they could have the same kind of failure all over again but on one of the other two saddle dams thanks very much philip um i've got somebody's put a question here that they want that they can answer from both philip and from saranee looking at the trans boundary uh aspects of this disaster it hasn't just affected communities in laos but also downstream in cambodia as well um this question question i ask how companies can be held responsible for the impacts on these communities even in a different country um you know when they're building projects in this way the very fact that it's trans boundary does that give you more leeway to hold companies responsible or not perhaps philip you could you could start bouncing that question this is a such a frustrating set of issues the other speakers have described in detail the terrific work that's been done both in south korea and in thailand to try to really establish some sort of corporate accountability in these cases um but we're left with a picture of an overall system that is really very weak in the absence of major public pressure on the corporations to respond it highlights what is well known which is the weakness of the international human rights system when it comes to corporate responsibility for human rights violations um and i don't think nearly enough is being done in the overall sense to try to improve that situation so when you get to a simple trans-border cambodia laos uh problem it runs up against all of the difficulties of trying to extract meaningful accountability from large corporate actors that are not put under appropriate pressure by either their own home governments or the host governments thanks phillips serenity your own thoughts on that yeah yes i'm sorry i'm not sure if um we have a i guess more optimism but uh what we i think can do at least in thailand um is um given the instrument i mentioned the national action plan on business human rights and that does mention cross-border investments it does spell out the various government agencies who will be in charge of implementing the plan i think the least we can do in thailand is to call out um these incidents as you know either examples of how the government is not being serious with implementing the plan or or call out the various um corporations in thailand on you know because i think one one trend we see is their increasing uh interest in human rights uh at least as a kind of um public announcement more corporations in thailand including banks have announced that they will adhere to the uh un guiding principles on business and human rights and i think that it's therefore um anyone's uh you know anyone has a right to to call them out on what uh actually is the concrete mechanisms they put in place uh to call them out on whether or not they have for example uh implemented the complaints mechanisms um properly um and to the banks i think sapien is a good case in the sense that the damage is very clear the sufferings are manifest and so it's just a matter of what actually are the corporations involved um doing given that you know public public commitment to human rights so i think that in thailand we will continue to to call them out and as well as engaging with the bank of thailand and the security exchange commission i would say as the two major regulators on the implementation of the national action plan the bank of thailand is also partly there as a promoter of um sustainable banking practices so so again we we see this as a very important test and so we'll continue to call out uh the various actors um you know on on uh whether or not they are improving their practices ceremony thank you very much uh we are actually just about out of time um so i'd like to thank um philip richard sarany and elliot for giving us their time on this really important issue uh and of course international rivers in the foreign correspondence club for making this event possible and just a quick thanks too to our superb technician david foster who's mixed this beautifully and made these online seminars possible at jai yen media here in bangkok um a really important issue and it's so good that using this two-year anniversary to run through these issues we can remind people that this this disaster has not been properly addressed uh and the the people who suffered and it shouldn't be forgotten so thank you all for watching uh from me in bangkok and to all of you good night [Music] [Music] you