The mainstream media is strangely silent on the ongoing flood disaster in China.
Heavy rains and flooding in China kill six, Three Gorges Dam on alert
Shweta Sharma
July 12, 2024 · 2 min read
China's largest Three Gorges Dam is on high alert as flooding caused by torrential rains wreaks havoc in southwestern China.
Record rainfall in Chongqing has caused flooding in more than a dozen districts and counties since Thursday, causing water levels to rise in 29 rivers, state news agency Xinhua reported.
According to the Chongqing Hydrological Monitoring Station, more than 250 millimeters of rain fell in the area, killing six people.
A drone shows a town submerged in mud and water.
On Thursday, Dianjiang County in Chongqing recorded its highest single-day rainfall of 269.2 millimeters.
a word of warning – China Observer is a Falun Gong affiliate who, in my opinion, often goes out of their way to show the Chinese Communist Party in the worst possible light. They appear to have a strong anti-Chinese political agenda – understandable given the brutal abuse of Falun Gong members by the Chinese Communist Party over the years. Last year China Observer produced a video claiming that the Three Gorges Dam had failed, but the dam apparently still exists, at least for now.
However, China Observer regularly broadcasts footage from within China that is difficult to obtain from other sources.
Why do people worry about the Three Gorges Dam bursting whenever heavy rain hits its source? The answer is that there is evidence that the dam was poorly sited and constructed, like many other questionable construction projects in China.
In 2020, the operator acknowledged that massive flooding had caused the dam to deform, but claimed that the dam remained safe.
Industry insiders say Three Gorges Dam is deformed but safe
Record floods in western province test engineering feats, outer structures buckle
Author: Frank ChenJuly 21, 2020
Beijing has made a rare admission that the 2.4-kilometer-long Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River in Hubei Province has been “slightly deformed” after record flooding.
The official Xinhua News Agency quoted the operator of the world's largest hydroelectric gravity dam as saying that some non-structural peripheral parts of the dam had buckled.
…
Flooding in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River in western provinces such as Sichuan and Chongqing reached a record peak of 61,000 cubic meters per second on Saturday, according to China Three Gorges Corporation, the state-owned company that manages the Three Gorges project.
There is evidence that the dam is anything but safe.
March 25, 2008
12 min read
China’s Three Gorges Dam: An Environmental Disaster?
Even the Chinese government suspects the dam could cause severe environmental damage
Standal City, Malawi
Government officials have long defended the $24 billion project as a major source of renewable energy in an energy-starved country and a way to prevent downstream flooding. When completed, the dam will generate 18,000 megawatts of electricity, eight times the power generated by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in the United States. But in September, government officials in charge of the project acknowledged that the Three Gorges contained “hidden dangers” that could create disaster. “We cannot let down our guard,” Wang Xiaofeng, who oversees the program at China's State Council, told a meeting of Chinese scientists and government representatives in Chongqing. “We simply cannot sacrifice the environment for temporary economic gain.”
The comments appear to confirm what geologists, biologists and environmentalists have been warning for years: that building large hydroelectric plants in areas that are densely populated, home to threatened plant and animal species, and cut through by geological fault lines would be a recipe for disaster. . .
Recently, an 800,000 cubic meter landslide occurred on the shore of the Three Gorges Reservoir.
Landslide in Zigui County, China on July 17, 2024
An interesting video documented an 800,000 cubic meter landslide on the shore of the Three Gorges Reservoir.
go through Dave Petley July 18, 2024
Yesterday, a striking landslide video was widely shared on social media showing a landslide that occurred on July 17, 2024 in Zigui County, China.
There's a pretty good version of this video on YouTube:-
…
Western media reported little about the failure, but Chinese news sites have some details. It is reported that the location is Jiajiadian Village, Guizhou Town, Zigui County, Hubei Province, on the bank of the Three Gorges Reservoir. Reports show that the landslide volume is approximately 800,000 cubic meters.
The background of this landslide is heavy rainfall that continues to affect large areas of China. The Three Gorges Dam has been used to store water to control flooding downstream, but over the past two days the floodgates have been opened to create new storage capacity ahead of the next round of rains. This raises the possibility that the landslide could be related to the dual effects of local soil saturation and falling lake levels. Interestingly, in the film, as shown below, there appears to be some freeboard in the reservoir:-
If a larger rainfall or earthquake-induced landslide occurs within the geologically unstable reservoir area, it could create a massive tsunami shock wave that would destroy the dam wall like a bucket of water being dropped on a sandcastle. The size of landslide tsunamis can be enormous—the 2015 Taan Sound landslide tsunami in Alaska was more than 600 feet high. I'm not sure what kind of force a 600 foot high tsunami would create, but I'm guessing the dam wall wouldn't hold up in that situation.
I don't know how likely such a landslide is to occur in the Three Gorges area, but given the geological instability of the area, I don't think the risk of a landslide-induced megatsunami, or even a regular earthquake that shatters wall supports, should be .
Obviously, we have no way of knowing whether this will be the year the Three Gorges Dam fails. People have been highlighting the dam's problems for decades and warning of its risk of collapse, but the dam is still there. But I'm not keen on living underwater in a building like this.
I would like to know how much flood risk insurance costs for factories or real estate in the Yangtze River Delta region? Maybe someone in China can tell us that a considerable part of China's population and about a quarter of China's most important economic assets are located downstream of the Three Gorges Dam in the Yangtze River Delta.
There is no doubt that climate change will be blamed when, not if, the Three Gorges Dam finally fails.
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