Qualla: Sambor Dam

Sambor Dam: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

South of Sambor village in Kratie province, the Mekong runs wide and unhurried, splitting around wooded islands and shelving over rock, doing nothing that looks like history. This is the site of the largest dam Cambodia has ever designed. Nothing stands here. Engineers have been drawing a barrage across this reach since the 1950s, and in the fullest version of the plan a wall eighteen kilometers long would have closed the entire river - the lowest of all the proposed Mekong mainstream dams, the final gate above the delta. In March 2020 the Cambodian government stopped it, and everything else proposed for the Mekong mainstream, for a decade.

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Sambor Dam: Seventy Years of Drawings

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Sambor project has outlived several political systems. First floated in the 1950s, it reappeared in 1994 when the Mekong Secretariat proposed a 3,300 megawatt structure blocking the whole river. Chinese interest followed: the power company known as CSG carried out a geologica...

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Sambor Dam: Eighteen Kilometers of Wall

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two configurations were on the table, and the larger one was very large indeed. It combined a concrete gravity dam with an earth rockfill embankment, running 18,002 meters end to end at a height of 56 meters, and would have carried an installed capacity of 2,600 MW - Cambodia's b...

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Sambor Dam: The Flood Pulse

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What made Sambor different from an ordinary large dam is where it sat in the plumbing of a country. Every monsoon the Tonle Sap river reverses direction, driven backward by the swelling Mekong until it floods the Tonle Sap lake to several times its dry-season size, and the fish t...

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Sambor Dam: The Kratie Reach

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The stretch of Mekong the dam would have occupied is also the last home of the river's Irrawaddy dolphins. Roughly 105 animals survive in a 190-kilometer reach of the Cambodian Mekong centered on Kratie - the entire remaining population, after the species disappeared from Laos in...

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Sambor Dam: A Pause, Not a Cancellation

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In March 2020, citing ecological concerns, Cambodia halted all hydropower development on the Mekong mainstream until 2030. Sambor was pushed back along with its upstream neighbor, the Stung Treng dam. It is worth being precise about what that means: a moratorium is a decision to ...

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