Water Safety

Team 'decided not to wear life jackets to paddle faster'
They found water calm and were confident during practice, says association president
By Carolyn Quek


A BIG LOSS: Photos of the dead dragon boat team members were placed outside a tented area at the mortuary where their bodies were taken to yesterday. They are Messrs Jeremy Goh (from left), Chee Wei Cheng, Stephen Loh, Poh Boon San and Reuben Kee. -- ST PHOTO: LIM WUI LIANG

PHNOM PENH - SINGAPORE'S dragon boat team wore their life jackets when they trained on the Tonle Sap before their race last Friday.
They found the water calm enough and were confident even using a different kind of boat for the Cambodian water festival race.

So after a discussion, they decided that they would be able to paddle faster and better without their life jackets, Rear-Admiral (Retired) Kwek Siew Jin, president of the Singapore Dragon Boat Association, said yesterday.

'They felt that conditions were benign enough for them not to have to wear the life jackets,' he said.

Speaking to reporters here, he said that had he known, he would not have allowed them to discard their life jackets.

In Singapore, for sure, that would not have been allowed. But life jackets were optional in the Tonle Sap race, and the team went with their decision.

RADM Kwek stressed that the paddlers were all very experienced, had a good assessment of the situation and were all strong swimmers.

'I tell you, these people are very comfortable in the water, with several years of experience. Otherwise, they can't make the national team,' he said.

'Look at the size of the captain. All of them have been training for years. If they are not rowing, they are training on weights.'

He said there would be 'a very thorough investigation', less to find fault than to find out how the tragedy could have been averted.

One answer, he said, might be to insist that paddlers wear life jackets in all competitions in future, no matter where they race and what the rules of the competition are.

RADM Kwek said that the 22 team members represented the cream of the crop in the sport, chosen from different dragon boating squads in Singapore.

They had hoped to make next month's South-east Asian Games in Thailand in the traditional boat race event, but the Singapore National Olympic Council turned them down.

Among other things, athletes or teams aiming for selection were expected to better or equal the third-placed timing of the last SEA Games to qualify.

The senior vice-president of the dragon boat association, Member of Parliament Lam Pin Min, said yesterday that the paddlers were invited by the Cambodian government in September to take part in the Tonle Sap races.

He said the team would probably have gone to Tonle Sap even if they had been selected for the SEA Games as it would have given them additional exposure.

RADM Kwek said the national squad members shared a fierce love and dedication for the sport, and spent so much time practising or working out that many were hardly home.

So when five of the men went missing on Friday, the others were devastated.

'In dragon boating, especially, the team spirit is very strong,' said RADM Kwek.

The deaths had left the surviving paddlers too distraught to speak to the media, he said, explaining why team members had refused to say anything to reporters all weekend.

The team is scheduled to leave Phnom Penh for Singapore this morning.

'We initially wanted them to go home as early as possible, but they requested to stay on because they wanted to know the fate of their team members,' he said.

He said the deaths of the five men were a great loss not only to their families, but also the sport.

'We were building up the national team. We hoped in the next few years, they could be good enough to compete internationally. Now, we have lost the services of five really good sportsmen,' he said.

He said he did not know all of the dead men personally.

'I usually meet them as a team, and you know how they all look the same - all big-sized and all beautifully built.'

carolynq@sph.com.sg


ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY LEONARD LIM IN SINGAPORE




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The Mekong river - The Economist

The sweet serpent of South-East Asia
Dec 30th 2003
From The Economist print edition

How much longer will the Mekong remain the world's last great unspoilt river?

EVERY October, on the night of the full moon, small globes of light rise from the Mekong river along the border of Laos and Thailand. One theory holds that methane drawn from the riverbed by the gravitational pull of the moon causes the “Naga fireballs”, as locals call the phenomenon. The devout, on the other hand, consider it a sort of spiritual firework display to celebrate the end of Buddhist Lent, while sceptics say that it is all a hoax, perpetrated by Laotian monks to put the fear of god into their flock.


Then there are the bizarre creatures that navigate these shifting currents: catfish the size of cows, dome-headed dolphins, crocodiles with a taste for royal blood—and relatively few people. Uniquely for such a big river in the heart of tropical Asia, the biggest city along the Mekong's banks—Phnom Penh—has a mere 1.1m inhabitants. That makes the river unusual in another respect: the pressure of a burgeoning population and fast economic growth is only just beginning to make its mark on the Mekong. But the outcome could be all too familiar: a poor compromise between conservation and development.

For centuries, the Mekong has disappointed those who have dreamed of turning it into a major artery of trade and industry. At times, overland routes have rivalled maritime ones as a conduit for east-west trade in Asia, but the sea has always provided the simplest way of getting from north to south. Thus Marco Polo probably crossed the Mekong on his way home to Europe from China in the 13th century, but did not travel along it. At any rate, he considered the river so inconsequential that he did not mention it in his account of the journey.

About the same time, 1,600km (1,000 miles) to the south, the only major civilisation to be built around the Mekong, the empire of Angkor, was reaching its apogee. Its Cambodian heartland sustained a population of at least 1m through rice farming along the shores of the Tonle Sap, and fishing in its waters. But the Mekong played a part in the empire's trade only in so far as it provided an outlet to the sea. The Chinese merchants and ambassadors who visited Angkor in its heyday came by boat from China's coast and then up the Mekong from the delta, not downriver from the Chinese province of Yunnan.

Four thousand obstacles
They did so in part because the Mekong is not navigable much beyond Phnom Penh. In the dry season, when the river is low, boats must dodge endless jagged reefs and shifting sandbars. Even when the water level crests, the many rapids of Si Phan Don, or “Four Thousand Islands”, in what is now southern Laos, form an insurmountable obstacle to shipping. Over a stretch of 30km, the Mekong divides into a muddled network of streams and channels, tumbling over cascades and shoals.

But the main reason this huge river has always been such a commercial backwater is the scanty population along its course. The biggest expanse of flat, well-watered and fertile land in the basin lies around Tonle Sap lake, but the devastating annual flood makes intensive agriculture difficult there. Depending on the strength of the rains, the surface area of the lake can swell to up to ten times its normal size during the monsoon. But the water recedes quickly when the rains stop, so the land is alternately flooded and parched.

No wonder, then, that the most powerful countries in the region took shape in more hospitable river basins: China on the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, Thailand on the Chao Phraya, Vietnam on the Red, and Burma on the Irrawaddy, leaving the lower Mekong to much-diminished Cambodian kingdoms. North of Cambodia, the Mekong flows through the periphery, not the centre, of all these countries.
European explorers, who began snooping around the Mekong in the 16th century, took hundreds of years to work that out, though. In the 1590s a party of Iberian conquistadors overthrew the Cambodian king and set themselves up as governors in the Mekong delta. A Dutchman, Gerritt van Wuysthoff, struggled upriver as far as Vientiane in 1641. But as late as the 1860s, when France conquered Vietnam and Cambodia, colonial officials knew nothing of the river's northern reaches. They still hoped that it might provide a lucrative back door to China, and in 1866 sent an expedition to explore both the Mekong's course and its commercial potential.

The leader of the expedition died en route, and the survivors brought back grim reports of impassable rapids and lawless hinterlands. But the optimists pressed on. They seized control of Laos in 1893, and tried to turn the Mekong into a thoroughfare linking all their colonies in Indochina. To get round the rapids in Si Phan Don, they built a railway across the river's two southernmost islands, Khon and Det, close to the Laos-Cambodia border. Goods could be shifted from boat to train at the southern terminus of the railway on Khon, below the rapids, and carried to a vessel above them, at the northern end of Det.

The scheme was more a triumph of engineering than of economics, however. Chinese merchants still found it cheaper to send goods to Laos overland via Thailand. After the second world war, the railway—the only one in Laos—fell into disuse. By now, villagers on Khon have prised up most of the tracks for use as fencing. Water buffalo graze on the grass that has sprouted on the old railway bridge linking Det and Khon. Not far off, a rusty French locomotive lies abandoned in a bog.

In the 1950s and 1960s, America, too, dreamed of harnessing the Mekong to enrich Indochina, and thus dent support for the region's communist insurgents. Its allies in the region, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam, set up an agency called the Mekong Committee to co-ordinate joint development projects. Plans were drawn up to dam the Mekong, and engineers got as far as surveying several sites before the ever-intensifying Vietnam war put an end to such schemes.

Thanks to all these disappointments, the Mekong remained almost untouched until the 1990s. The first dam on the river, at Man Wan, in China, was not completed until 1993. The first bridge across the lower Mekong (ie, outside China) was built a year later, between Vientiane in Laos and Nong Khai in Thailand. To this day, much of the river feels deserted. Between the town of Stung Treng, in northern Cambodia, and the Laotian border, hardly a house can be seen. There is so little traffic on the road that runs parallel to the river north of the border that “you could sleep on it,” as one local remarks. Farther north still, along some stretches of the river near Luang Prabang, only odd patches of cultivated land give any hint of human settlement.

But that is changing fast. The population of Cambodia is growing by 2.6% a year, and that of Laos by 2.3%—among the highest rates in Asia. Growth is lower in the Thai and Vietnamese parts of the basin, but they have long been more densely populated. Economic growth is even faster: 5-6% in 2003 in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, 7-8% in China and Vietnam.

Build and destroy
To accelerate this trend, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is promoting a scheme to integrate the economies of the “greater Mekong sub-region”. Two north-south highways are under construction to link China and Thailand, one via Laos and the other via Myanmar. So are five east-west routes linking Thailand and Vietnam, three via Laos and two via Cambodia. A tie-up of electricity grids and telecoms networks is also getting under way.

The ADB may find it as difficult to make the region boom as the French and Americans did. But one element of the current development drive is bound to leave its mark on the Mekong: dam-building. According to the International Rivers Network, an anti-dam group, some 100 large dams are proposed for the Mekong basin.

China has already completed two on the Mekong itself, has started work on a third, and plans at least four more. By the time the Mekong enters Vietnam, it has already formed a delta, leaving no opportunity for dam-building—so the government is building five dams on the one big tributary that strays across its mountainous border with Cambodia instead. Thailand, too, has dammed the main tributaries that flow across its territory. The biggest dam enthusiast of all is dirt-poor Laos, which hopes to enrich itself by building enough hydropower projects to become the battery of South-East Asia.

This barrage of dams generates valuable electricity, aids irrigation and regulates flooding—but in the process does irreparable damage to what was, until recently, the Mekong's most valuable resource: its fisheries. The Mekong and its tributaries yield more fish than any other river system. The annual harvest, including fish farms, amounts to about 2m tonnes—or roughly twice the catch from the North Sea. The Mekong is home to over 1,200 different species of fish, more than any other river save the Amazon and the Congo. Over 1m people in Cambodia depend solely on fishing to make a living, while in Laos 70% of rural households supplement their income by fishing.

The abundance of fish stems from the Mekong's seasonal ebb and flow. During the monsoon, when the plains around the river and its tributaries flood, the habitat for fish suddenly increases by as much as ten times. Moreover, much of the flood-plain is actually forest, which provides a particularly nutritious array of rotting leaves for the fish to feed on. Many species in the Mekong have evolved to take advantage of this delectable smorgasbord. They spawn at the end of the dry season, so that the coming floods can carry the fry to the flood-plain. The bigger the flood, the greater the feast on offer, and so the fatter and more numerous the fish.

More dams, however, mean smaller floods. Most hydroelectric plants aim to generate the same amount of energy year-round. That requires a consistent flow through the turbines, which in turn requires rainwater to be held in a reservoir for use in the dry season. The same drawback, of course, applies to dams designed for flood control. Dams for irrigation, meanwhile, have a doubly damaging impact on fisheries: they not only hold back water, but also encourage the conversion of forest to farmland in the flood-plain.

Irrigated rice-farming, which is two or three times more productive than the rain-fed sort, is growing rapidly throughout the basin, albeit from a low base. In Laos alone, the area under irrigation increased eightfold in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the Mekong River Commission, the latter-day successor to the Mekong Committee, calculates that flood levels have fallen by almost 11% since 1965.

Fishermen all along the Mekong are already complaining of falling catches. For now, at any rate, the problem stems more from the growing number of fishermen than from falling numbers of fish. The Mekong River Commission calculates that the fish catch actually doubled in Cambodia between the 1940s and the 1990s. But over the same period, the number of fishermen (along with the population as a whole) has more than tripled, leading to a decline of 44% in the amount each one takes home.

To make matters worse, even if the catch as a whole is stable, certain species are clearly dying out. The Siamese crocodile, which used to pluck picnicking princesses off the riverbank, according to French explorers, has already disappeared from the main river. Perhaps a few hundred remain in the forested highlands of Laos and Cambodia—but they too are threatened by hunting and habitat loss.

A similar fate awaits the Irrawaddy dolphin. According to Isabel Beasley, an academic, there are only about 70 of these dark grey, snoutless creatures left in the entire Mekong basin. These few survivors, she explains, follow the fish in the dry season to deep pools in the bed of the river near Kratie, in Cambodia. Despite their scarcity, they can easily be spied at these spots, breaking the surface in gentle arcs in pods of three or four. But fishermen also follow the fish, and often snag the dolphins unintentionally in the large-mesh nets they leave unattended for days at a time. As mammals, they need to come to the surface to breathe at intervals of roughly 20 minutes. So any that are caught in nets have usually drowned long before the fishermen return to inspect their catch.

Suffering catfish
The reasons behind the dramatic decline in other species are murkier. Take the giant catfish, the world's largest freshwater fish, which can grow up to 3 metres (10 feet) in length and weigh up to 300kg (660lb). It used to be found throughout the Mekong basin, but has completely disappeared from most areas. In Chiang Khong, traditionally a prime fishing ground, the catch declined from 69 in 1990 to two in 2000, and none since. Unlike smaller species, which reach reproductive age within a year, giant catfish take about seven years to mature, and so are seven times more vulnerable to over-fishing. They also migrate upstream to spawn, though no one knows where, exactly, they go, and therefore whether the proliferation of dams is playing a part in their demise.

In general, the Mekong is so little studied that the effects of any development project are hard to predict. China, for example, is paying for a scheme that involves blowing up reefs in Laos, Myanmar and Thailand, to provide a navigable channel for ships of up to 150 tonnes. But halfway through the blasting, the Thai government has suspended the project, for fear that the faster flow of an unimpeded current would increase erosion and thus alter the midstream boundary with Laos. Fishermen also worry that, since the reefs may be prime breeding-grounds for fish, including the giant catfish, the catch of all species will plummet if their habitat is destroyed.

That fear is not far-fetched. Something similar happened in 1994, when Thailand, with money from the World Bank, completed a hydropower dam on the Mun river, a major tributary of the Mekong. Since then, the fish catch directly upstream has declined by 60-80%, according to a study by the World Commission on Dams. The same study argued that, thanks to cost overruns and lower-than-expected generation at peak times, it would have made more sense to build a gas-fired plant.

To avoid a similar fiasco, the World Bank is insisting on umpteen studies and safeguards for the Nam Theun II, a big dam it is financing on a tributary of the Mekong in Laos. But the authoritarian rulers of China, Myanmar and Vietnam do not always mull over big projects so carefully, and no cost-benefit analysis at all is made of the thousands of small dams, irrigation schemes and land clearances that are undertaken each year throughout the basin. Anyway, governments in upstream countries are unlikely to give much thought to the impact of projects on lowly fishermen or farmers beyond their borders.

In theory, that is the job of the Mekong River Commission. Its members, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, are slowly drawing up pacts on the exploitation of the Mekong and its tributaries. In 2001 they agreed to exchange data on water flows. A pledge to notify one another about big projects came next, and then a system to check up on such declarations. Next year, if all goes according to plan, they will fix the minimum amount of water each country must discharge downstream and, in 2005, rules on water quality.

But none of these pacts will amount to much so long as China and Myanmar refuse to join the Mekong River Commission. Officials from downstream countries—somewhat hypocritically—say that China's dam-building schemes threaten the whole basin. But for upstream countries, of course, membership of the commission would bring many restrictions and few benefits.

China has, however, been keen to rid itself of the image of a budding regional bully, and has courted South-East Asian countries with trade concessions. It also needs the acquiescence of downstream countries in schemes such as the reef-blasting. In 2001 it agreed to the minimal step of sharing data on water levels with the commission, to provide an early-warning system for floods. After all, say officials at the commission, co-operation among the riparian states, like the river itself, should flow in both directions.