Three years ago it took 84 days for soldiers and peasants working flat out to build a 15 km wall to protect the rice paddies of Mundok County on North Korea's west coast. On Thursday, the seven metre-high wall and houses behind it were destroyed by a tidal wave which hit it with what locals described as a noise "like an atomic bomb".
Yesterday, two aid workers from the Irish relief agency, Trocaire - Ms Niamh O'Carroll and Ms Mary Healy, who are in North Korea monitoring food aid distribution - became the first westerners to see the devastation, and witness frantic efforts to rebuild the dyke before a high tide on Thursday.
"The crop of 45,000 tonnes of rice was destroyed," said Ms O'Carroll, interviewed by telephone in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, last night. "When you picked up the rice there was just husks, nothing else."
The rich, reclaimed land formed the country's fourth-largest co-operative farm in a productive area on which the North Korean government was depending to alleviate the famine.
Officials at the site 100 km north of Pyongyang said they had witnessed nothing like it in living memory in North Korea, which is suffering famine conditions after two years of floods and a prolonged drought. They said 45,000 soldiers were engaged in a race against time to rebuild the wall.
The tidal wave resulted from Typhoon Winnie which swept up the Yellow Sea from Shanghai in mid-week. The salt water flooded the land and several coal mines in the area.