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CHONGQING -- Water levels at China's Three Gorges Dam set fresh records on Friday despite a gradual decline in inflows, doing little to assuage concerns of a possible collapse that would affect 400 million residents.
NATURAL DISASTERSAs water crests, Three Gorges Dam crisis puts 400m at riskMore torrential rain forecast along Yangtze River basin on Sunday
Water is discharged Tuesday from the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei Province. © Xinhua via Kyodo
SHUNSUKE TABETA, Nikkei staff writerAugust 22, 2020 01:30 JST
CHONGQING -- Water levels at China's Three Gorges Dam set fresh records on Friday despite a gradual decline in inflows, doing little to assuage concerns of a possible collapse that would affect 400 million residents.
Inflows into the dam, one of the world's largest flood control facilities, declined 5% on Friday. But the water level is still rising because the amount of water discharged has also been cut back to limit flooding downstream. And with another round of torrential rain along the Yangtze River basin feared on Sunday, authorities remain on high alert.
In the winter, when rainfall is light, water is allowed to accumulate to a maximum of 175 meters for efficient transportation and power generation. During the summer, the limit is set at 145 meters to more effectively control flooding during the rainy season. The current water level is far above that, at 166 meters.
The growing burden on the dam has spurred talk of a potential failure that would have disastrous consequences.
When the water level rose during last month's flooding, the dam operator told the Communist Party-affiliated Global Times that there is no risk of deformation or collapse. But if it did burst, the resulting deluge would inundate Shanghai and other cities, affecting more than 400 million people living downstream.
 Rescue workers evacuate a resident stranded by floodwaters following heavy rainfall in China's Sichuan Province on Aug. 18. © Reuters
Fears over the dam add to the woes already suffered from several bouts of torrential rain this summer. Flooding in central and southwestern China has already killed hundreds and displaced millions just as the country appeared to be past the worst of the coronavirus pandemic.
The 185-meter-high, 2.3-km-wide Three Gorges Dam has a reservoir of 39.3 billion cu. meters of water and can generate electricity equivalent to 20 standard nuclear reactors. According to the operator, the facility is the largest hydroelectric power station in the world as well as the top flood control structure in terms of capacity.
The dam was first proposed in 1919 by Sun Yat-sen, but progress stalled amid the Cultural Revolution.
The National People's Congress finally approved the start of construction in 1992, but with an unusually large number of dissenting votes amid widespread environmental and budgetary concerns about the project. A total of 177 representatives voted against the proposal and 664 abstained, compared with 1,767 votes in favor.
Then-Premier Li Peng, himself a hydroelectric engineer, headed an expert committee on the project and pushed forward with construction, which began in 1994. The dam, which began storing water and generating electricity in 2003, was completed in 2006, and started operating at peak power capacity in 2012. Roughly 1.3 million people were forcibly relocated for the project.
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After Covid, China’s Leaders Face New Challenges From Flooding
Unusually heavy rains have wreaked havoc in central and southwestern China, leaving hundreds dead and disrupting the economy’s post-pandemic recovery.
The southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing on Wednesday. Premier Li Keqiang visited the flood-stricken city this week.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Steven Lee Myers
Aug. 21, 2020Updated 11:21 a.m. ET
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Having brought the coronavirus pandemic largely under control, China’s leaders are now struggling with a surge of crippling floods that have killed hundreds of people and displaced millions across the central and southwestern parts of the country.
Flooding on the Yangtze River peaked again this week, in Sichuan Province and the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing, while the Three Gorges Dam, 280 miles downstream, reached its highest level since it began holding water in 2003.
This year’s flooding has unfolded not as a single natural disaster, with an enormous loss of life and property, but rather as a slow, merciless series of smaller ones, whose combined toll has steadily mounted even as official reports have focused on the government’s relief efforts.
“The Chinese nation has fought natural disasters for thousands of years, gaining precious experience,” the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, declared on Tuesday after a visit to Anhui, another flooded province downstream from the Three Gorges Dam. “We should continue to fight.”
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Mr. Xi called China’s disaster relief efforts “a practical test of the leadership and command system of our army.” He met with relatives of three people who died while fighting floods, and on Wednesday he addressed officers of the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Armed Police, which have been involved in the relief work.
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Community workers and volunteers delivered food and supplies to people in the Sichuan Province city of Neijiang this week.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Public appearances in flood-stricken areas by Mr. Xi and China’s premier, Li Keqiang, underscored the severity of the crisis, which has delivered another blow to an economy still struggling to rebound from the pandemic.
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Mr. Li visited Chongqing, where the Yangtze spilled over its banks for the fifth time this year and, on Thursday afternoon, breached the historical high reached in 1981. The leaders have tried to reassure people that the government was doing everything it could, but some might have doubts.
“I believe that the Chinese public will question Beijing from this year’s continuous natural and man-made disasters, and even question China’s governance model and its effectiveness,” said Wu Qiang, an independent political analyst in Beijing.
One resident of Chongqing, in a video of the flooding there that circulated on a popular social media platform, said: “The losses have been heavy for many businesses, fighting the pandemic in the first half of the year and flooding in the second half.”
The floods had already caused at least $26 billion in economic losses before this week. At a briefing in Beijing last week, Zhou Xuewen, the secretary general of China’s flood control headquarters, said that at least 63 million people had been affected and 54,000 homes destroyed. At least 219 people have died or disappeared, he said.
Residents being evacuated in Meishan in Sichuan Province. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, called the disaster relief efforts “a practical test of the leadership and command system of our army.”Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In Sichuan on Friday, a landslide caused by heavy rains killed at least six other people in a village near Ya’an. Another in the same region left five people missing.
Heavy rains are normal in southern China during the summer, but this year’s fell harder and longer than usual, inundating crops and entire communities over the last two months. Perhaps not coincidentally, Mr. Xi announced a campaign against food waste against the backdrop of the flooding, though officials have insisted there is no impending food crisis.
The heavy rains this year have revived a debate over the Three Gorges Dam, a massive project begun in 1994 that forced the relocation of more than a million people, inundated entire communities and badly damaged the surrounding environment.
The flow of water into the dam’s reservoir reached 75 million liters a second, breaking a record of 61 million liters set just last month, according to a statement from the Ministry of Water Resources. Although officials said the dam was in no danger, the water level has approached maximum capacity.
Since the floods began in June, officials have repeatedly offered reassurances that the dam could withstand what has been called once-in-a-century flooding. Some reports in state media have gone further, claiming that the dam had almost certainly prevented even worse flooding in major cities downstream, including Wuhan, where the Covid-19 pandemic began.
The Tuojiang River in Sichuan Province, swollen by heavy rains.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On Friday, officials announced that the flow into the Three Gorges dam had eased somewhat, though they remained on alert. “The flood control pressure on the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River has been reduced,” the government’s Xinhua news agency reported.
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China’s other great waterway, the Yellow River, has also experienced more flooding. The Ministry of Water Resources said in a statement that in Shaanxi Province on Friday, the river had reached the highest level since 1997. Nearly 700 smaller rivers and tributaries have also flooded, straining older dams and levees.
The floods have threatened some of the country’s most famous landmarks. In Sichuan, floodwaters rose to the base of the Leshan Giant Buddha, a 1,200-year-old sculpture carved out of the mountainside that is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
In Chongqing, the flooding consumed Ciqikou, an ancient riverside trading port near where the Jialing River merges with the Yangtze. Xinhua reported that the waters reached the third stories of some buildings on the steep riverbank. Photographs showed brown water submerging vast stretches of the city’s waterfront, including Hongyadong, an 11-story structure that is a popular tourist destination.
The structure has been closed since Tuesday and workers have been clearing out the mud that reached its lower levels.
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“It’s too scary how the water rose,” the manager of a restaurant there, who would only give her surname, Zhang, said by telephone on Friday. “Humanity is insignificant in the face of disaster.”
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Security guards kept watch by an alley in Chongqing that had been blocked off because of floods.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Claire Fu contributed research.
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Steven Lee Myers is the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times. He joined The Times in 1989 and has previously worked as a correspondent in Moscow, Baghdad and Washington. He is the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin,” published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015. @stevenleemyers • Facebook |
