M’Lop Tapang, a local non-profit organization, has been working with vulnerable children, youth and their families in the Sihanoukville region for over 18 years. There has been massive and rapid development in the local area, especially since 2018-2019 when major Chinese investment began pouring into the city. Large casinos, condominiums, resorts were built, and many of which are still unfinished and left abandoned following the bust in the construction boom due to the governments online gambling ban. With the unprecedented speed at which development was happening, the infrastructure problems became glaringly obvious.
With land being filled in for building projects, M’Lop Tapang’s location became more at the “bottom of the hill” you could say, where a nearby canal quickly fills after a heavy rain, and trash and water rushes into the main center location. Prior to 2019, this degree of flooding was more of a rare occurrence.
This week, after heavy rains, we once again experienced flooding into our main center. There have been new bridges and cement boundaries erected recently by the government to help with holding back soil from spilling into the canal, however, the cement reinforcements have not been installed near the center yet, resulting in rapid erosion in the land near M’Lop Tapang.
We are in for quite the problematic rainy season this year if something isn’t done to help reinforce the canal. It has been a difficult year already due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, so it’s unfortunate M’Lop Tapang has to deal with flooding issues on top of everything else.
Submitted by a M’Lop Tapang Technical Advisor. For more details, visit http://mloptapang.org/
