Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy

At the time of the 1975 Revolution, when the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party came to power, the country had one large dam of 15 megawatts or more. In September 2018, Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith said Laos has “about over 50 hydropower dams”.

The 2018 collapse of a Lao dam is far from an old, closed file stored in dusty archives, but that is the rather strange, surreal feeling one gets when searching online for updates about the disaster and its aftermath in this Southeast Asian country of 7 million people.