Nepal’s flood disaster puts its hydropower-first strategy, exports to the test

Filed 2h ago · Via Mongabay · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Diplomatic Security Service from Washington, D.C., United St · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Flash floods originating on the Nepal-China border on Aug. 26 knocked out roughly 10% of Nepal's national grid capacity, destroying the 42-year-old Devighat plant and damaging a 25-MW solar facility along with transmission infrastructure on the Trishuli River.

Hundreds of engineers and workers remain unaccounted for, with industry group IPPAN citing 983 missing against the government's lower count of 639, while officials estimate losses in the hundreds of billions of rupees with no timeline for restoring the damaged projects.

Experts note the pattern was predictable: surface-built powerhouses and dams were wiped out while underground designs, including one plant built with flood-probability assessments, survived largely intact. Proposed fixes — longer access tunnels, underground construction, and maximum-credible-flood assessments — would raise project costs by an estimated 10 to 12%, a bill nobody has yet agreed to pay.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

The lesson here is not subtle: build critical infrastructure near a snow-fed river using thirty years of data and cost-driven shortcuts, and eventually the river will remind you it doesn't read spreadsheets. Everyone quoted agrees on the fix and on who should have paid for it decades ago — which is exactly why it wasn't done.

Source: Read the original at Mongabay → Scored: Reign Supreme · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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