North Korea causes flooding in South Korea

The usual suspects over at Marmot's Hole like to paint a picture of South Korea as buddy-buddy with North Korea and a near-enemy of the United States, but Pyongyang wouldn't be Pyongyang if it didn't do something on occasion that would teach everyone that they are not on the same side as Seoul.

Yonhap reports today that North Korea suddenly released a "massive amount of water" from a dam near the DMZ last Friday, without prior notice, causing hundreds of millions of won in flood damages in the northern part of South Korea's Kyonggi-do Province.

By opening the gates of the so-called "April 5 Dam" on the Imjin River that straddles the border region, the river's water level shot up to 3.96 meters in five hours, near flood level, up from the normal level of 1.16 meters.

Going back to the 1980s, one fear that South Korean authorities had was that North Korea might use dam releases as a weapon against the South. Death and destruction could easily occur if water were to rush into the South, as we can see from the hundreds of dollars in damage that this caused.