(June 20, 2010) Fan Xiao, Chief engineer of the Regional Geology Investigation Team of the Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau, says dams were the real trigger of a massive landslide in Kangding County in China’s southwestern Sichuan province.

Reports in China’s state-run media are blaming heavy rains for the massive landslide this week that swept 23 dam construction workers to their death and blocked a river in China’s south west region.

But Fan Xiao, Chief engineer of the Regional Geology Investigation Team of the Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau, says the likely trigger was dam construction along a tributary of the Dadu River, itself a tributary of the Yangtze in China’s Sichuan province.

“It’s mainly because of large scale work in recent years to construct the hydroelectric plants,” says Fan Xiao. “Along the Dadu River there are over 20 hydropower stations which are all undergoing large-scale work … this has damaged the stability of the mountainsides, leading to mudslides when it rains. And digging also damages the stability of the mountain body, so eventually this creates a large scale mountain collapse.”

The landslide, some 1.5 million cubic feet of earth, occurred last Tuesday at around 1:30 in the morning when part of a mountain collapsed in Kangding County in China’s southwestern Sichuan province.

The landslide crushed a shed where construction workers slept and temporarily blocked the water flow.

Fan Xiao also argues that the Zipingpu dam on Sichuan province’s Min River likely triggered China’s devastating 2008 earthquake. He is joined by a growing chorus of experts who agree that the dam’s reservoir likely shifted the land mass and lubricated nearby fault lines to trigger the earthquake that killed close to 90,000 people. The geological phenomena is known as reservoir-induced-seismicity.

Fan Xiao says that hydropower construction along the Dadu River poses the same risks.

“Many hydropower plants along the Dadu River are very large in scale. They have very tall dams that store a large amount of water. Coincidentally, the river is along an earthquake belt, and chances of these dams triggering an earthquake are very high too.”

In recent years, the Chinese regime has undertaken numerous hydropower projects to supply growing demands for electricity.

After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake Fan Xiao, and other experts, including a burgeoning environmental movement in China, called for a suspension of new hydropower plants and a reassessment of geological risks posed by large-scale dams in the area.

Patricia Adams, Probe International, June 20, 2010

Further Reading:

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• Controversial SW China dam sparks new showdown
• China to build dozen more hydropower plants on Yangtze River
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• FACTBOX: Hydro development along the upper Yangtze and tributaries
• Geological risks and sediment problems with dam building in southwest China
• Stop over-development of hydropower is the only way to save rare fish in the Yangtze
• China’s big dams: Are they safe?
• Chinese environmentalists and scholars appeal for dam safety assessments in geologically unstable south-west China
• Four people dead, 53 missing in China landslide
• High tension in Sichuan dam standoff
• Controversial Zipingpu dam may have caused China’s deadly earthquake, says Chinese geologist Fan Xiao
• Leftover problems of the Dahe Dam
• Fragile Three Gorges: Caijing magazine reports
• Don’t build dams everywhere, expert warns
• Integrated analysis of stress and regional seismicity by surface loading: a case study of the Zipingpu reservoir
• Chinese geologist says Zipingpu dam reservoir may have triggered China’s deadly quake, calls for investigation
• China water official denies plan to dam India river
• People power sinks a dam
• China secretly executes anti-dam protester
• Northwest may grab more Yangtze water