A look into the dubious levee dismantlement

In a shocking development, the Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) has found that the Moon Jae-in administration’s decision to dismantle the levees installed on the Geum River and Yeongsan River — and leave them open permanently — despite strong opposition by local residents, was made in a dubious way. Earlier, the BAI asked the prosecution to investigate former Environment Minister Kim Eun-kyung, the head of examining and evaluating the four major river restoration projects, and a lower official on suspicion of getting involved in the unfathomable decision-making process.

The Moon administration in January 2021 made the decision to demolish the two levees on the rivers after permanently opening several levees on the four rivers four years before. At the time, experts raised doubts about the rush to “disassemble the two levees based on incorrect data.” Park Seok-soon, professor emeritus of environmental science and engineering at Ewha Womans University, criticized the liberal administration for reaching the wrong conclusion by “manipulating the results of the cost-benefit analysis.”

The government watchdog found problems with the analysis for dismantling the levees. The BAI reached the conclusion that the Environment Ministry hurriedly decided to destroy the levees to meet the deadline despite a critical lack of credibility from the broad gap in the cost-benefit data — up to 10 times even for the same levee — depending on calculation methods and comparison dates. That means a national project may have been pushed by a rule of thumb.

More worrisome is the over-reflection of the views of certain civic groups in setting up the planning and special committees within the examining and evaluating team for the four-river project. In particular, an official of the ministry leaked the list of recommended specialists to the civic groups to remove them in advance if they supported the four-river project pushed by the conservative administration. If the civic groups demanded their names be removed, they could not be recruited. A majority of specialists were hired as members of the team thanks to civic groups’ recommendations.

If the Moon administration really reached the conclusion to dismantle the levees and open them permanently in such ways, that’s a big problem. After the decision, farmers in the region suffered a chronic shortage of underground water, not to mention a lack of electricity from the all-out suspension of small hydro power plants. The ministry plans to request a review of the decision-making process from the Water Commission Support Department under the president. It must determine the fate of levees solely based on science so as not to repeat any mishaps.