Wang Weiluo on the July flood discharge from Beijing’s reservoirs

By Other News Sources on July 30, 2025 • ( Leave a comment )

Politically driven overfilling, structural flaws, and emergency discharges at several of the city’s reservoirs point to systemic failures in prioritizing water storage capacity over flood safety, says expert.

By The Epoch Times | Summarized and Translated by Three Gorges Probe

Beijing’s devastating July floods have called into question the city’s massive Miyun Reservoir, reports The Epoch Times. According to hydrologist Dr. Wang Weiluo, high-risk water storage practices at northern China’s largest reservoir—specifically the overfilling of the Miyun with South-to-North Water Diversion Project inflows—left the reservoir with little capacity to absorb record rainfall.

Dr. Wang warns the Miyun, which exceeded its flood limit (152m) by over 3.5 meters before the deluge, had been operating in an extremely dangerous state. Authorities were forced to initiate high-volume emergency discharges (up to 1,120 m³/s) with little public warning, contributing to downstream flooding and at least 30 deaths, as well as enormous property losses.

Once a symbol of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” the hastily erected Miyun Dam (1958-60) located 80 km northeast of downtown Beijing, poses a latent threat due to its substandard construction standards. Dr. Wang recalls the dam nearly collapsed during the 1976 Tangshan earthquake due to near-catastrophic failure on the reservoir’s Bai River section. If the dam had breached, he notes, the deluge could have reached Tiananmen Square, overwhelming the site at a depth of two meters—underscoring the risks of the dam’s rushed ideological origins.

Historically, the Miyun Reservoir has only been forced to release floodwaters three times: in 1969 during a Cold War alert, in 1976 due to earthquake damage, and now in 2025. Dr. Wang argues that political pressure to maintain high reservoir levels, touted as a “success” by local authorities, ignores the basic tenets of flood safety and hydrological risk management.

In a separate interview with Probe International’s sister site, Three Gorges Probe, Chinese water specialist Wang Jian—a former Beijing water official—emphasized the unusual intensity of July’s rainfall event, dubbed a “rain trap” by experts. He pointed to the human toll endured by Miyun and upstream sections of the Miyun Reservoir, where flash floods struck so suddenly people had little time to escape.

He also takes into account the coordinated emergency discharges from more than a dozen regional reservoirs—operating in crisis mode alongside Miyun’s releases—as a compounding factor, their synchronized outflows likely amplifying the cascading flood surge that devastated downstream communities.

The map below provides an overview of the area’s hydrological network, tracing the upstream Bai and Chao rivers as they converge to form the Chaobai River beneath the Miyun Reservoir’s dam. From there, the Chaobai carves southward through Beijing’s urban core before draining into the densely populated province of Hebei in North China.