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A house is submerged in floodwater after continuous torrential rains in the townships of Jiujiang and Jinde, in China's Eastern Jiangxi Province. (Epoch Times Archive)
A Chinese blogger posted an article on the Internet criticizing the Three Gorges Dam for carrying out "magical" flood control—saving the upstream city of Chongqing while flooding the downstream city of Wuhan, or the other way around. The article was widely posted and quoted on the Web.
As the world’s largest hydropower project, is the Three Gorges Dam going to live up to its promise of controlling flooding along the Yangtze River in this round of floods?
Ironically, as areas along the Yangtze River have been plagued by floods in the past few years, officials have downgraded the dam’s flood-control capacity from “able to withstand the worst flood in 10,000 years” in 2003, to 1,000 years in 2007, and to 100 years in 2008.
Recently, just before the historical high-peak flow passed the Three Gorges Dam, Cai Qihua, chief of the Yangtze River Water Resources Commission, was quoted on China’s state-run CCTV as saying, “We cannot put all our hopes on the Three Gorges Dam this year.”
Critics Cite Failures
Hydrology expert Wang Weiluo, in an interview on Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, recently commented on how bad the recent floods along the Yangtze River have been: “Chongqing City is located directly upstream of the dam. Fourteen of its counties and cities are flooding now. Going further up, many people have died because of the severe floods in Sichuan Province.
“Downstream of the dam, the water levels in Wuhan city and Hong Lake in Hubei Province and the Dongting Lake areas in both Hunan and Hubei Province are fairly high. The water level of Poyang Lake in Jiangxi and Anhui Provinces is also very high. Over 100 dams near the Poyang Lake are full,” Wang said.
The dam’s three major functions are supposed to be flood control, shipping, and power generation. However, Wang says that the flood this time has proven that two and one-half of the three functions do not exist: “It does not control floods. The shipping services in the entire Three Gorges channels have been suspended because of the flood.
“We can also forget about shipping in drought season,” Wang said. (This is because the reservoir retains the water, so the water level downstream will be even lower.)
Wang further explained: “We could already see the bottom of the Jialing River—one of the Yangtze’s branches—in Chongqing City, based on pictures taken last year. Now the Jialing River is flooding, and there is a lot of mud in the water. The water cannot really be used to generate power because the mud would cause significant damage to the turbines.”
AFP reported in July of last year: “China's massive dam projects have been a source of controversy for years. The government insists they provide a clean source of energy and control flooding, with the world-biggest Three Gorges Dam the highest-profile example.
“But critics say the dams often cause huge environmental problems and do little to control floods, while millions of people have been displaced to make way for them, and the projects are often riddled with corruption.
“China Daily reported last month that several dams on China's Yellow River were close to collapse just a few years after they were built, and there are concerns that over 40 percent of the nation's reservoirs were unsafe.”
