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A major landslide is threatening to submerge a new town built to house people who have been moved to make way for the Three Gorges dam, the Chongqing Morning Post (Chongqing Chenbao) reports.

An estimated 20 million cubic metres of rock and earth are threatening the centre of Wushan and putting the town’s population of more than 10,000 newly resettled migrants at risk.

Dozens of new buildings, including a school serving 2,000 children, lie in the path of the landslide should it slip further down the mountainside, the newspaper reported March 3. A new county courthouse, police station, epidemic-prevention centre and port authority building are also threatened.

A reporter for the newspaper who visited the site was alarmed at the deteriorating situation. The landslide was slowly inching forward and causing roads to crack. A 10-metre wide gap had opened in one new road.

Almost half of the new town is being built on top of an old landslide, the newspaper said. It quoted Xu Kaixiang, chief engineer of the Three Gorges geological disasters prevention headquarters, as saying that construction work in the area has reactivated old landslides.

The world’s biggest dam being built on the Yangtze River is situated in a geologically unstable area that is prone to landslide disasters. A survey by the Changjiang Water Resources Commission (CWRC) last year identified 1,320 sites in the area that are at risk of landslides and mud-rock flows.

Two senior water engineers recently urged the Beijing government to undertake a geological-safety inspection of all new settlements being built in the area before the dam reservoir is filled next year. Wen Fubo, former director of the CWRC, and Zheng Shouren, current manager of the CWRC’s engineering group, warned that lives would be put at risk unless potentially dangerous areas are checked and double-checked. [See “Leading engineers call for geological-safety inspection,” Three Gorges Probe, Feb. 21, 2002]

Impounding a huge body of water in the reservoir, scheduled to take place in June next year, is likely to activate at least 760 landslips, the two experts said. Construction work under way on a vast number of new settlements could also trigger geological disasters, they warned.

Officially, 1.2 million people are being resettled because of the dam, though critics of the project predict the final figure is likely to be closer to two million. Two cities, 11 county seats, 116 small towns and 6,301 villages are being relocated away from the area due to be flooded.

The town currently under threat is the new county seat of Wushan, 125 km from the dam. The Chongqing Morning Post did not give the exact date of the landslide, but said emergency teams have been working on the dangerous site for two months, including during the lunar new year holiday last month. The teams are monitoring the landslide and taking urgent measures to halt its movement, the newspaper said.

Two more teams of experts are being sent to the area next week to conduct further landslide checks in the Chongqing and Hubei sections of the future reservoir, the newspaper said.