The article makes the assertion that communities often form around remote dams, and perhaps this is true for dams in the desert or dams on the plains, but maps

The article makes the assertion that communities often form around remote dams, and perhaps this is true for dams in the desert or dams on the plains, but maps and photos of this region reveal that the rivers here are deeply incised among steep mountains, there's essentially no arable land, and villages have been clinging to cliffs just above the rivers for as long as humans have settled here. There's simply nowhere else for them to live, and they've lived there long before any dams. The people who died in this disaster died because a surge of water and mud and debris rushed down the river valley from high up in the mountains. You can't arrest a debris flow [1], you either have to hope it doesn't happen, or engineer at great cost that it doesn't happen, or you pre-emptively relocate to a place where you won't be caught in it. These are hard choices, but the nature of the problem is simple, and traces back to topography.. [1] You can arrest a debris flow with a very large embankment of your own, preferably if there's no lake behind it; water is not compressible, so a debris flow into a reservoir will always risk overtopping the dam with a frighteningly large wave. But, putting dry dams in a narrow river valley is much more complex than dams behind which water can collect.