Essay by Eric Worrall
The mainstream media is strangely silent about an impending flood disaster in China.
Three Gorges Dam on alert: Heavy rain and floods kill six people in China
Shweta Sharma
July 12, 2024·2 min read
The Three Gorges Dam, China's largest dam, is on high alert as floods caused by torrential rains are causing devastating damage in the southwest of the country.
Record rainfall in Chongqing has caused flooding in a dozen districts and counties since Thursday and raised the water levels of 29 rivers, state news agency Xinhua reported.
According to the Chongqing Hydrological Monitoring Station, six people died in the region where more than 250 millimeters of rain fell.
A drone showed a village submerged in muddy water.
Dianjiang county in Chongqing received 269.2 mm of rain on Thursday, the highest rainfall ever recorded in a single day.
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Read more: https://au.news.yahoo.com/three-gorges-dam-alert-heavy-114946310.html
The following is a video from China Observer.
A word of caution – The China Observer is a Falun Gong-affiliated media outlet and, in my opinion, often goes out of its way to portray the Chinese Communist Party in the worst possible light. They seem to have a strong political agenda against the CCP – understandable considering how brutally the CCP has mistreated Falun Gong members over the years. Last year, the China Observer produced a video claiming that the Three Gorges Dam had broken – but the dam is clearly still standing, at least for now.
However, the China Observer regularly shows footage from China itself that is difficult to obtain from other sources.
Why are there fears of a possible collapse of the Three Gorges Dam every time heavy rains hit the dam's headwaters? The answer is that there is evidence that the dam, like many other questionable construction projects in China, is poorly sited and poorly built.
In 2020, operators acknowledged that the dam had been deformed by a major flood, but claimed the dam was still safe.
Three Gorges Dam deformed but safe, say operators
Peripheral structures collapse as record floods in western provinces test engineering capabilities
By FRANK CHEN21 JULY 2020
In a rare revelation, Beijing has admitted that the 2.4-kilometer-long Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River in Hubei province has become “slightly deformed” following record floods.
The state news agency Xinhua quoted the operator of the world's largest dam as saying that some non-structural, peripheral parts of the dam had collapsed.
…
The deformation occurred last Saturday as floodwater from western provinces, including Sichuan and Chongqing, reached a record 61,000 cubic meters per second along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, according to the China Three Gorges Corporation, a state-owned company that operates the dam and the giant power plant beneath it.
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Read more: https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/three-gorges-dam-deformed-but-safe-say-operators/
There is evidence that the dam is far from safe.
25 MARCH 2008
12 mins reading time
China's Three Gorges Dam: An environmental disaster?
Even the Chinese government suspects that the huge dam could cause significant environmental damage
CITY OF MARA HVISTENDAHL
Government officials have long defended the $24 billion project as a vital source of renewable energy for an energy-hungry country and a way to prevent flooding downstream. When completed, the dam will generate 18,000 megawatts of electricity — eight times as much as the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in the U.S. But in September, the government official in charge of the project acknowledged that the Three Gorges Dam carries “hidden dangers” that could lead to disasters. “We must not let up,” Wang Xiaofeng, who oversees the project for China's State Council, said during a meeting of Chinese scientists and government officials in Chongqing, an independent municipality of about 31 million people that borders the dam. “We simply cannot sacrifice the environment for temporary economic benefits.”
The comments seemed to confirm what geologists, biologists and environmentalists had been warning about for years: building a huge dam to generate electricity in an area that is densely populated, home to endangered animal and plant species and riddled with geological faults is guaranteed to lead to disaster.
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Read more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-three-gorges-dam-disaster/
A few days ago, a landslide involving 800,000 cubic metres of mass occurred on the banks of the Three Gorges Dam.
The July 17, 2024 landslide in Zigui County, China
An 800,000 cubic meter landslide on the shore of the Three Gorges Reservoir was captured in an interesting video.
From Dave Petley July 18, 2024
Yesterday, a remarkable landslide video was circulated on social media, showing a landslide that occurred on July 17, 2024 in Zigui County, China.
There is a pretty good version of this video on YouTube: –
…
There has been little coverage of this landslide in the Western media, but some details can be found on Chinese-language news sites. The location is said to be Jiajiadian Village in Guizhou City, Zigui County, Hubei Province, on the banks of the Three Gorges Reservoir. The landslide is reported to have a volume of about 800,000 cubic meters.
The backdrop to this landslide is a period of very heavy rainfall that has affected large parts of China. To cope with the flooding downstream, the Three Gorges Dam has been used to store water, but over the last two days the gates have been opened to create new storage capacity ahead of the next wave of rain. This suggests the possibility that the landslide is related to the twin effects of local soil saturation and lake subsidence. Interestingly, in the video, as seen in the still image below, there appears to be some open space in the reservoir:-
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Read more: https://eos.org/thelandslideblog/the-17-july-2024-landslide-in-zigui-county-china
A landslide within the geologically unstable reservoir region triggered by much heavier rainfall or earthquakes could generate a massive tsunami shock wave that could smash the dam like a bucket of water on a sandcastle. Landslide tsunamis can be massive – the landslide tsunami in Taan Fjord, Alaska in 2015 was over 180 meters high. I'm not sure what forces the impact of a 180 meter high tsunami would generate, but I suspect the dam would not hold up under such circumstances.
I do not know how likely such a landslide is in the Three Gorges region, but given the unstable geology of this area, I believe that the risk of a landslide-triggered mega-tsunami or even a normal earthquake destroying the wall supports should not be completely ruled out.
Of course, there is no way of knowing whether this will be the year the Three Gorges Dam will collapse. For decades, people have pointed out the problems with the dam and warned of the danger of collapse, but the dam is still standing. But I would not want to live in the depths of such a structure.
I wonder what it costs to insure factories or properties in the Yangtze Delta against flood risks. Perhaps someone in China can tell us – a significant proportion of the Chinese population and around a quarter of the country's most important economic assets are located downstream of the Three Gorges Dam in the Yangtze Delta.
There is no doubt that climate change will be blamed when – and not if – the Three Gorges Dam finally breaks.
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