Tag: Three Gorges Dam

Yangtze River flow set to exceed level of catastrophic 1998 floods

(July 19, 2010) WUHAN (Xinhua) — The Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze River will face its first major flood-control test yet Tuesday as the flow on the river’s upper reaches nears 70,000 cubic meters a second — 20,000 cubic meters more than the flow during the 1998 floods that killed 4,150 people.

To little surprise, environmental programs at Three Gorges are falling short

(July 5, 2010) As the environmental problems continue to plague the massive Three Gorges dam, officials are falling way behind on programs to contain the pollution caused by its construction. Less than a fifth of the “water environment” programs laid out in a ten year plan in 2001 have been completed, while all nine of the projects to control pollution from ships have not begun, according to Vice-Minister of Environmental Protection Zhang Lijun.

Responding to Graeme Kelleher

(June 22, 2010) In his interview with chinadialogue’s editor, Isabel Hilton (In defence of dams, May 27), engineer and water-resource expert Graeme Kelleher says critics of China’s Three Gorges dam should accept the “facts” that the dam protects the environment by reducing coal burning and “saves thousands of Chinese people from being drowned in the floods of the Yangtze River every year.”

Danjiangkou Reservoir: A tale of two watersheds

(June 16, 2010) In the ultimate photo-op this week, Danjiangkou Mayor Zeng Wenhua, with press in tow, ladled a cup of water out of his city’s reservoir and drank it "without hesitation" to demonstrate its purity. The Danjiangkou Reservoir—on the Hanjiang River, a branch of the middle reaches of the Yangtze River—is slated to provide Beijing with water by 2014, once the central channel of the South-North Water Diversion scheme is completed.