Instead, they’ve got local officials telling them they should be grateful to the plant.

Since the floods, the Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development have sent officials to inspect A Vuong. Local residents were looking forward to the inspection being fair and transparent so that penalties could be imposed on the responsible party for the flooding.

But things have turned out differently.

Cao Anh Dung, deputy head of the trade ministry’s Industrial Safety Techniques and Environment Agency, said after his inspection that “A Vuong reservoir helped cut the impact of the flooding in half.”

How could the flood be lessened by a release of water into over-flowing rivers?

Does Dung know that in fact very few villages were flooded until A Vuong’s gates were opened, releasing a rush of water so large and fast that villages were submerged and whole neighborhoods and forests washed away in a matter of hours?

Should the people who lost their homes thank A Vuong for its noble deed?

They are not naïve. They know that power plants withhold water in the dry season, when they’re hungry, and then release water in the wet season, when they’re already up to their ears in it.

A Vuong Hydroelectric Joint Stock Co., which manages the plant in question, was supposed to inform the province of the release six hours in advance in order to evacuate residents from low lying areas along the Vu Gia River.

But the company failed to do so. It only informed authorities one hour before it began discharging water.

The release pushed floods 1.5 meters higher than their normal levels.

Nguyen Thanh Quang, vice director of Quang Nam Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, said that though the A Vuong plant didn’t cause the floods all by itself, it was still responsible because “releasing water at an inappropriate point in time was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Dung said there was no other choice because “the flood and the storm occurred at the same time,” pushing water from all rivers in the area to the power plant site.

That sounds silly. The builders and designers of A Vuong Hydropower Plant knew that storms in the central region always bring floods and that the plant site was known as a flooding hotspot.

Along the central region, besides Quang Nam’s 14 hydropower plants, Quang Ngai Province has 10, Quang Tri and Thua ThienHue provinces have 5-7 each. These giant bodies of water are hanging above millions of people. The operators of these plants, and concerned officials, should take responsibility for the lives lost, instead of hiding behind the “nature-is-too-cruel” excuse.

By Tra Son