A dam in southern Norway suffered a partial rupture on Wednesday after days of torrential rains that triggered landslides and flooding in the mountainous region and forced riverside communities to flee their homes, authorities said.
Authorities initially considered blowing up part of the dam at the Braskereidfoss hydroelectric power station to prevent villages downriver from being flooded, but the idea was scrapped after water gushed through the structure, the police spokesman told reporters. Fredrik Thomson.
“We hope to achieve a gradual leveling of the water and that it be a uniform leveling,” he said.
The power station on the Glomma, Norway’s longest and mightiest river, was submerged and out of service.
Huge amounts of water fell on the western part of the concrete dam, the spokesman said.
For hours, the water accumulated behind the levee. Then a parking lot next to the power plant was flooded, and soon after, water began gushing through a breach in the concrete wall, destroying a two-lane road and fencing that ran across the top of the dam. .
Per Storm-Mathisen, a spokesman for the company that operates the power plant, Hafslund Eco, told Norway’s NTB news agency that the water diversion appears to be “going well.”
At least 1,000 people reside in riverside villages in that area, and authorities say they were all evacuated before the dam collapsed.
The hydroelectric plant’s hatches were supposed to open automatically if too much water accumulated behind the dam, but they didn’t work as planned, for reasons still unknown, according to Alexandra Bech Gjorv, a member of Hafslund Eco’s management.
However, on Tuesday, a seventy-year-old Norwegian woman died after falling into the river. She managed to swim to shore, but police said that due to the flooding, it took the rescue team several hours to transport her to the hospital and she ended up dying.
More than 600 people have been evacuated from a region north of Oslo, with police in the south of the country calling the situation there “uncertain and chaotic”.
Norway’s Department of Public Highways said on Wednesday that all main roads between Oslo and Trondheim, the country’s third-largest city, were closed.
“We are experiencing a crisis of national dimensions,” Innlandet County Governor Aud Hove said.
“There are people isolated in several local towns and emergency services may not be able to reach people who need help,” he added.
The weather system dubbed Storm Hans has battered parts of Scandinavia and the Baltics for several days, causing rivers to overflow, damaging roads and breaking tree branches that injure people.
More torrential rain is expected on Wednesday in southern Norway and central Sweden, after shacks, small homes and caravans were swallowed by rivers and swept away by strong currents.
Norwegian meteorologists indicated that up to 30mm of rain could be expected overnight and that “the amounts are not extreme, but given the conditions in the region, the consequences could be.”
Source: TSF
