Tarbela T-5 construction halted indefinitely after bund breach floods tunnel
Deputy Commissioner Waseem Ahmed says all Pakistani and foreign workers were moved to safety and no one was killed; an inquiry will establish why the bund failed.
HARIPUR: A protective bund at the Tarbela Dam's T-5 hydropower site gave way on Monday, sending a large volume of water into Tunnel Five and halting construction work there indefinitely, Haripur Deputy Commissioner Waseem Ahmed said.
Ahmed visited the site after the breach and confirmed that the tunnel had flooded. He said the district administration and rescue agencies moved all Pakistani and foreign workers to a safe location. One Pakistani worker was swept into the water as the tunnel filled and was pulled out by emergency teams. No casualties were reported.
The deputy commissioner said construction and development work on the project had been suspended indefinitely. A high-level inquiry will examine the circumstances of the bund's failure and establish whether a structural weakness or a technical fault was responsible, he said. The Express Tribune reported that Ahmed said the next course of action would be determined once the investigation report was received.
The site belongs to the Tarbela 5th Extension Hydropower Project, a Water and Power Development Authority scheme built at Tunnel No. 5 of the dam. It is designed to add 1,530 megawatts to the dam's generation capacity through three units of 510MW each, lifting Tarbela's installed capacity from 4,888MW to 6,418MW and producing an average of 1.347 billion units of electricity a year.
WAPDA awarded the $354.6 million civil works contract to Power Construction Corporation of China Limited in May 2021. The project's approved cost is $807 million, with the World Bank providing $390 million and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank $300 million.
The extension has been delayed repeatedly. Its completion deadline, originally five years from the start of work, has been pushed to September 2027. A project director told a Senate committee in September 2024 that progress had been held up by, among other factors, difficulty in obtaining a no-objection certificate from the Indus River System Authority for closing Tunnel 5.
Construction was also suspended temporarily in August 2025, when rising reservoir levels and heavier inflows brought water into the site.
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