Mainstream media is strangely quiet about an unfolding flood catastrophe in China.
Three Gorges Dam on alert as heavy rain and floods kill 6 in China
Shweta Sharma
12 July 2024·2-min read
The Three Gorges Dam, China’s largest, is on high alert as floods triggered by torrential rains wreak havoc in the southwestern part of the country.
Record rainfall in Chongqing has caused flooding in a dozen districts and counties since Thursday, raising the water levels in 29 rivers, state news agency Xinhua reported.
Six people have died in the region which has received over 250mm of rain, according to the Chongqing Hydrological Monitoring Station.
An aerial drone showed a township submerged in muddy waters.
Dianjiang county in Chongqing received 269.2mm of rain on Thursday, the highest in a single day ever.
However, China Observer regularly shows footage from inside China which is difficult to obtain from other sources.
Why do concerns about the collapse of the Three Gorges Dam emerge every time a severe rainfall event strikes the headwaters of the dam? The answer is there is evidence the Dam is badly sited and badly constructed, like a lot of other questionable construction projects in China.
In 2020 operators admitted a large flooding event had deformed the dam wall, but claimed that the dam was still safe.
Three Gorges Dam deformed but safe, say operators
Peripheral structures buckle when record flooding from western provinces puts feat of engineering to the test
In a rare revelation, Beijing has admitted that its 2.4-kilometer Three Gorges Dam spanning the Yangtze River in Hubei province “deformed slightly” after record flooding.
The official Xinhua News Agency quoted the operator of the world’s largest hydroelectric gravity dam as saying that some nonstructural, peripheral parts of the dam had buckled.
…
The deformation occurred last Saturday when the flood from western provinces including Sichuan and Chongqing along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River peaked at a record-setting 61,000 cubic meters per second, according to China Three Gorges Corporation, a state-owned enterprise that manages the dam and the sprawling power plant underneath it.
Government officials have long defended the $24-billion project as a major source of renewable power for an energy-hungry nation and as a way to prevent floods downstream. When complete, the dam will generate 18,000 megawatts of power—eight times that of the U.S.’s Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. But in September, the government official in charge of the project admitted that Three Gorges held “hidden dangers” that could breed disaster. “We can’t lower our guard,” Wang Xiaofeng, who oversees the project for China’s State Council, said during a meeting of Chinese scientists and government reps in Chongqing, an independent municipality of around 31 million abutting the dam. “We simply cannot sacrifice the environment in exchange for temporary economic gain.”
The comments appeared to confirm what geologists, biologists and environmentalists had been warning about for years: building a massive hydropower dam in an area that is heavily populated, home to threatened animal and plant species, and crossed by geologic fault lines is a recipe for disaster.
There is little in the western media about this failure, but Chinese language news sites have some details. The location is reported to be Jiajiadian Village, Guizhou Town, Zigui County, Hubei Province, on the banks of the Three Gorges Reservoir. Reports indicate that the landslide has a volume of about 800,000 cubic metres.
The context for this landslide is a spell of very heavy rainfall that has been affecting a large area of China. To manage downstream flooding, the Three Gorges Dam has been used to store water, but in the last two days the gates have been opened to create new storage capacity ahead of the next round of rainfall. This raises the possibility that the landslide might have been associated with the twin effects of local soil saturation and drawdown of the lake. It is interesting to note that in the video, as shown in the still below, there appears to be some freeboard in the reservoir:-
A much larger rainfall or Earthquake triggered landslide inside the geologically unstable reservoir region could generate a colossal tsunami shockwave, which could smash the dam wall like throwing a bucket of water at a sand castle. Landslide Tsunamis can be enormous – the Alaskan Taan Fjord landslide Tsunami in 2015 was over 600ft high. I’m not sure what kinds of forces an impact from a 600ft Tsunami generates, but I’m guessing the dam wall would not hold in such circumstances.
I don’t know how likely such a landslide is in the Three Gorges region – but given the unstable geology of the region, I do not believe the risk of a landslide driven mega tsunami or even a regular Earthquake which shatters the wall supports should be entirely discounted.
Obviously there is no way to know if this will be the year the Three Gorges dam collapses. People have been hi-lighting the problems with the dam and warning of the risk of collapse for decades, yet the dam is still there. But I would not be keen to live down water of such a structure.
I wonder what it costs to insure factories or realestate in the Yangtze Delta against flood risk? Perhaps someone in China can tell us – a sizeable fraction of China’s population, and around a quarter of China’s most important economic assets, are located down river of the Three Gorges Dam in the Yangtze Delta.
No doubt when, not if, the Three Gorges Dam finally collapses, climate change will be blamed.
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