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The outcomes of all research conducted during more than a 20 year period (from 1967 to 1990) in the area of Lake Sarez is a mixture of miscellaneous facts differently interpreted by their authors, a combination of various hypotheses and suppositions.
Arguments on a full collapse of the Usoy Dam and a gigantic flood sweeping away the valleys of the Bartang-Pianj-Amudaria River and demolishing everything on its way are simply groundless conclusions of "experts" who are far from understanding the real scope of the problem.
The problem of the stability of the Usoy Dam has caused quite a number of arguments and discussion during the whole history of its existence. It is clear now that the dam is stable and cannot collapse in an instant. Indeed, there is a certain danger due to the seismicity of the region yet it is much lower than it had previously been suspected.
Considering the situation, in October 1997, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Government of the Republic of Tajikistan convened an International Conference on the Problems of Lake Sarez. The conference took place in Dushanbe and was attended by Russian and Central Asian experts. They included several geologists and geoscientists who previously had conducted an intensive scientific research in the dam and the lake area.
In order to find the solution for the existing hazardous problem, President of the Republic of Tajikistan Emomali Rakhmonov appealed to the world community requesting assistance in dealing with the problem of Lake Sarez.
In 1998, the non-governmental organization FOCUS Humanitarian Assistance USA implemented a number of measures aimed at assessing the nature of the hazard and at the elaboration of an emergency warning system for the settlements located in a close proximity to the lake. The project resulted in:
1. Recruiting participation by affected and concerned groups including community organizations, vulnerable communities, local governments, departments of the Ministry of Emergencies, NGOs, and international humanitarian agencies that are likely to participate in response to a major natural disaster.
2. Assessing the human resources and institutional infrastructure available for the development of a comprehensive disaster management plan.
3. Convening a series of province, district and community level workshops to motivate and enable stakeholders to take ownership of the planning process, and to begin developing local capabilities for effective rescue and recovery assistance, and for community self-help during and after the potential disaster.
4. Design and installation of a two-way radio communication system to be used for disaster warning and disaster management.
A second conference was convened by Focus Humanitarian Assistance USA in Washington, DC, in the summer of 1998, and was attended by Western geoscientists and representatives from USAID and the World Bank. It concluded that insufficient information concerning many aspects of the problem was available, and it recommended a reconnaissance of the Lake and the Bartang valley. This reconnaissance, undertaken in October 1998, led to the conclusion that Usoi dam shows no obvious signs of instability. However, it recommended that installation of a monitoring program for the dam, lake and a system to warn downstream towns and villages in the event of an outburst should be high priorities. In early 1999, the World Bank began planning to implement these recommendations.
In June 1999, a second reconnaissance was organized by the UN International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) Secretariat. This mission was fielded with assistance from USAID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), the World Bank, Focus Humanitarian Assistance, and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). It consisted of a combined group of Western and Tajik scientists who studied the dam and lake, as well as the inhabitants and environment of the Bartang valley for approximately 200 km downstream. The members of this reconnaissance team concluded that the probability of a massive outburst flood from Lake Sarez was low in the near- to mid-term, but, should such a flood occur, the impact on the downstream valleys would be devastating. The following table summarizes data from a USACE flood model developed after the 1998 workshop in Washington.
The team concluded that, irrespective of such an outburst flood, virtually all human habitations in these mountains are subject to hazards associated with earthquakes, slope instability, and flooding. These are the common elements linking the hazard represented by Lake Sarez with the hazards faced by individual villages. These hazards are extremes on a continuum ranging from high-magnitude, low- frequency events, as represented by Lake Sarez, to low-magnitude, high-frequency events such as rock-falls and seasonal flooding, faced by virtually all villages.
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