GreenBkk Scoop | Building blocks

Building blocks

Dam power comes on stream, the progenitor to Thailand's economic development

Forty-six years ago this nation, still on the first leg of its long march to economic development, celebrated the completion of one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken in this part of the world: the Bhumibol Dam.

His Majesty the King presides over the opening ceremony of Thailand’s first multi-purpose dam.

Standing at a height of 154 metres and 486 metres long at its crest, back then it was one of Asia's largest multi-purpose dams. It was deemed crucial to feed the need of the Kingdom's population, then 30 million, and factories just coming on stream.

The foundation-stone laying and opening ceremony - documented in the Bangkok Post on June 26, 1961, and May 18, 1964, respectively - were presided over by His Majesty the King after whom it is named.

The idea to build a hydro-power dam first took hold in the years soon after World War II when power blackouts were a common occurrence just as demand from households as well as the industrial sector was growing.

There was opposition in parliament for the project which required a massive loan of US$65 million from the World Bank, the biggest Thailand had sought until then, but the government of Field Marshal Pibulsonggram, later ousted in a coup, gave the green light.

Miraculously, the project survived succeeding governments during which a number of locations were considered and rejected, before a consensus was reached to build the dam in Tak province - where the Ping River, a major tributary that feeds the Chao Phraya River, runs through a mountain passage known as "Yan Ree". Over time, call it mispronunciation or whatever you like, Yan Ree came to be called Yanhee, which is why the dam, before it was christened Bhumibol, was known as Yanhee.

Their Majesties the King and Queen examine the control board for electricity transmission at the Bhumibol Dam.

Not counting the years spent on field survey and design work, the construction, undertaken by a US company and overseen by Thai engineers, took five years to complete. Strategically blocking the Ping River, the dam spawned a huge reservoir that extended all the way to the lower part of Chiang Mai, ensuring year-round supply of water for farmlands as well as towns and cities downstream. The electricity it generated fed consumers in Bangkok and 35 other provinces in the north, central and eastern regions.

Over the years, the Bhumibol Dam may have lost some of its prominence as the country's premier source of electricity, but its lead role in the management of natural water hasn't diminished one bit.

And it's worth noting that income from the sale of electricity the dam generated paid off the debt we owed the World Bank, a perfect riposte to those who had opposed its construction, arguing that it would take a generation or more to repay the loan.

Without the dam, this huge amount of water will just drain down into the sea soon after the rains. However, efficient water management relies not on dams alone but also on many other factors such as forest conservation, proper farming practices and careful town planning.

The nuts and bolts

Embarking on a project this big 46 years ago was no easy task. Perhaps you can get an idea of the working condition of those dam pioneers from the following excerpts from The Life and Aspirations of Kasame Chatikavanij, a biography of the engineer who headed the construction of the Bhumibol Dam and later became the first governor of the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand which has been overseeing the dam since 1969.

The Bhumibol Dam is an awesome sight to behold. But the story behind its construction is even more amazing.

"...The pioneers of the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand, or Egat, were all engineers from Chulalongkorn University. We had enlisted all their graduates because there were no other educational institutions teaching electrical engineering at the time. But none of the graduates, whether local or overseas, had first-hand experience in working on a construction project of this magnitude. Thailand had not yet begun its development process and thus engineering skills were sorely lacking. We were novices when it came to driving 20-metre piles, erecting high-rises over nine floors, or laying high-voltage transmission lines. Designing was then our main forte.

Working in those days did not afford us the luxury of sitting relaxed in air-conditioned offices. All of us had to work hard and there were no exceptions because labour work was just as important as an engineer's. We had to start learning the trade from scratch - how to handle a hot rivet and erect steel structures.

A 'rivet' was a metal bolt that was hammered between steel structures to hold them together and has long since been replaced by the conventional bolt and nut. In those days, rivets did not come ready-made from factories but were cast on site. The red-hot rivets would then be thrown from the ground up onto the steel structure where a worker stood waiting with a bucket to catch them. If the structure rose several levels high, the worker on the first landing would throw these rivets up to the next landing and so on. These workers had to be precise marksmen for should they miss the 'flying' rivets they could get burnt. The sight of the 'flying' rivet was also spectacular in that the luminious body was trailed by a burning tail of flying sparks as it shot upward. When I saw the sophisticated ground-to-air missiles on television during the Gulf War, I was immediately reminded of the 'flying' rivets. Finally, the molten rivets were then inserted between the steel structures and the headless end beaten flat.

The new experiences were exciting and fun and we were like children discovering new toys. We never tired of improvising ways to solve the problems that cropped up in the course of the project.

Back then the highest building in Thailand was on Yaowaraj Road. It was only nine floors high, relatively small in size and used wooden piles as foundation supports. A massive power plant, on the other hand, carried a load in the hundreds of tonnes and wooden piles would not be able to withstand such a weight. The answer was concrete piling, which was non-existent at the time. We therefore designed a special pile that was a steel tubing with a rocket-like head that was driven into the ground. Concrete was then poured in and the steel tubing pulled out, leaving only the cylinder-shaped concrete in the ground. This would become the 'concrete pile'.

When we first put our idea into action, the steel tube refused to budge because the crane was not powerful enough. Only through our perseverance did the tube finally give in. But lo and behold, it had also brought up the concrete that had by this time hardened. So we had to cut open the steel casing, an operation that left littered across the site giant cylindrical blocks of concrete. Someone remarked they looked like giant 'khao lam' - a Thai snack made of cooked sticky rice in a bamboo section - and we laughed till it hurt..."

- Khun Kasame died on October 17 at the age of 86. He gave the book to Bangkok Post journalist Pongpet Mekloy and allowed re-publication of its contents during an interview earlier this year at the lobby of the Four Seasons, one of his favourite places to chill out.

A villager tries to catch fish with a cast net in the ankle-deep water of the Ping River during construction of the dam. After completion of the project, the reservoir it spawned has made fishery another major source of income for the locals.

Did you know ...

- Apart from the Bhumibol Dam, other major public utilities named after His Majesty the King are the Bhumibol Hospital and the Bhumibol Bridges (the Industrial Ring Road Bridges).

- The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (Egat), which operates the Bhumibol Dam, is the offshoot of a merger of three former state enterprises in 1969: the Yanhee Electricity Authority, the Lignite Authority and the Northeast Electricity Authority.

- The Yanhee Electricity Authority and the Royal Irrigation Department supervised the construction work of the Bhumibol Dam, originally referred to as Yanhee Dam.

Thousands gather under the Bhumibol Bridges during the opening ceremony on November 24 this year.

- To ensure uninterrupted supply of cement during the dam construction, the Royal Irrigation Department set up Jalaprathan Cement in 1956.

- The main source of electricity during construction was the Mae Moh lignite plant based in Lampang.

- These days hydro-power no longer plays a leading role in electricity generation, contributing less than 10% of Egat's overall output. Most of its power plants now run on natural gas.

Credit: Bangkok Post (www.bangkokpost.com)