SANTIAGO. - The commission from this city which studied the handling the dawn of December 12 of the Tavera dam, whose hastened drainage caused floods and which according to Civil Defense and Emergency Commission reports killed at least 30 people here and in the Northwest, concluded that the authorities didn’t handle the dam correctly by lowering its level once they learned of Tropical Storm Olga.

That conclusion, presented in a press conference in the hotel Gran Almirante today, states that during the 40 hours between midnight Sunday the 9th to 4 p.m. Tuesday the 11th the dam’s level “remained at 325.10 meters above sea level, without the need to lower the level which operating instructions and common sense dictates."

For the commission, it was the first mistake, "since if 500 cubic meters per second had been spilled during these 40 hours, instead of the 100 cubic meters per second which were turbined, 57 million additional cubic meters had been drained and which had the availability to receive the peak swelling which arrived from Tuesday night, December 11, at 11 p.m. and which, according to the authorities, reached 51 million cubic meters of water."

The investigators also say, that by publicly stated that everything was normal in the dam, mainly at Tavera "the authorities of INDRHI (water resources institute) and the National Emergency Commission (COE), “released information which correspond neither with the approaching reality, nor with what was occurring in the Tavera Dam."

"The procedure for opening the Tavera dam’s six floodgates wasn’t implemented  correctly, since they weren’t opened gradually, by pairs, as the instructive stipulates, but instead were opened suddenly, the six at the same time and that caused an extraordinary discharge with the capacity of flooding and destruction," the commission says.

It said there was no adequate handling of the dam during the swelling of the waters which reached the its crest, which it says was another error, since when seeing that at 10 p.m. the dam’s level rose to 326 meters and continued to rain intensely, “the correct thing was to warn Civil Defense and the COE to evacuate the residents in the zones near the Yaque river’s channel and begin to release 500 cubic meters per second, constantly."

The commission recommends a review of the emergency instructing operations for every Dominican dam, in order to update them "and prevent situations like what occurred at Tavera dam during the passage of the Olga storm from being repeated in the future, where the value of the stored water was more important for the authorities of the EGEHID and the CDEEE (State power companies), than lowering the risk of producing unnecessary deaths."

n addition to reviewing the instructions in each dam, which during waves, storms, hurricanes or any other phenomenon which produce extraordinary swellings in river basins, it says there should be a limit to the Sate power companies’ control in the dam’s operations.

The commission’s members are Rafael Corominas Pepín, Orlando Franco, Osiris de Leon, Ervin Vargas, Luis Peña, Danilo González, Rolando Martinez and Roberto Suriel, Carlos Manuel Estrella, Jose Devárez and Enmanuel Castillo.