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| March 2, 2001 | atimes.com | ||
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Southeast Asia
On-off Bakun Dam on again On September 4, 1997, at the height of the Asian financial crisis, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad announced that the 2,400 megawatt hydroelectric Bakun Dam project in Sarawak would be postponed indefinitely, much to the delight of its opponents On Tuesday, the cabinet gave its go-ahead for the project based on its original design and power-generating capacity, apart from the initial plan to lay the world's longest submarine cable (650 kilometers) across the South China Sea to peninsular Malaysia from Sarawak. The power generated from the dam will be sold to Sabah, Sarawak, Brunei and possibly Indonesia's Kalimantan province. The dam will have a massive 205-meter high concrete face and it will flood an area of tropical rainforest the size of Singapore island (69,640 hectares). First proposed in the 1960s, the project was shelved for environmental reasons in 1990, but revived in 1993 when it cleared - in controversial circumstances - environmental hurdles. As a result of the first postponement, the government took over the project from Sarawak tycoon Ting Pek Khiing's listed Ekran Bhd, and it will continue to run the project. The dam, which is Malaysia's biggest ever infrastructure project, has been widely criticized as being too expensive, and deemed as environmentally and socially disastrous. More than 10,000 people have already been resettled to make way for construction. On Wednesday, Malaysian Finance Minister Tun Daim Zainuddin was quoted as saying the revived project will be one third cheaper than the earlier estimated cost. The project was estimated to cost 13.5 billion ringgit (US$3.5 billion) before it was shelved. This would put the revised cost at about 9 billion ringgit. The government is estimated to have already sunk 1 billion ringgit into the project, of which 500 million went to Ekran as compensation for it being scrapped. Work on the diversion tunnel is in the implementation stage and will be completed by April, while the whole development is expected to be completed in five to six years. |
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