Interfax
August 18, 2006

Officials are struggling to maintain power output at the Three Gorges and Gezhouba dams as water flow into the Three Gorges section of the Yangtze River is the lowest in 130 years.

Beijing The Three Gorges Dam project is not responsible for the drought in Sichuan Province and the neighboring municipality of Chongqing, Dong Wenjie, the director of the China Meteorological Administration’s National Climate Center said in an interview with the state press. 18 mln people currently lack access to drinking water in the two southwestern Chinese regions. Dependence on hydropower means that the area is also suffering from acute electricity shortages. The water flow into the Three Gorges section of the Yangtze River is the lowest in 130 years at just 8,100 cu m per second, affecting power output at the Three Gorges hydropower project and its neighbor, the Gezhouba station. Officials at the facilities are working to maintain output, but a spokesman for Yangtze Power, the listed owner of Gezhouba as well as several generators at the Three Gorges Project, told Interfax that some generators have already stopped operations. The average runoff of the upper reaches in the Yangtze River has been 59.75% lower than the normal figure as a result of the drought, according to the China Power News.