Mainstream media is strangely quiet about an unfolding flood catastrophe in China.
Three Gorges Dam on alert as heavy rain and floods kill 6 in China
Shweta Sharma
12 July 2024·2-min read
The Three Gorges Dam, China’s largest, is on high alert as floods triggered by torrential rains wreak havoc in the southwestern part of the country.
Record rainfall in Chongqing has caused flooding in a dozen districts and counties since Thursday, raising the water levels in 29 rivers, state news agency Xinhua reported.
Six people have died in the region which has received over 250mm of rain, according to the Chongqing Hydrological Monitoring Station.
An aerial drone showed a township submerged in muddy waters.
Dianjiang county in Chongqing received 269.2mm of rain on Thursday, the highest in a single day ever.
However, China Observer regularly shows footage from inside China which is difficult to obtain from other sources.
Why do concerns about the collapse of the Three Gorges Dam emerge every time a severe rainfall event strikes the headwaters of the dam? The answer is there is evidence the Dam is badly sited and badly constructed, like a lot of other questionable construction projects in China.
In 2020 operators admitted a large flooding event had deformed the dam wall, but claimed that the dam was still safe.
Three Gorges Dam deformed but safe, say operators
Peripheral structures buckle when record flooding from western provinces puts feat of engineering to the test
In a rare revelation, Beijing has admitted that its 2.4-kilometer Three Gorges Dam spanning the Yangtze River in Hubei province “deformed slightly” after record flooding.
The official Xinhua News Agency quoted the operator of the world’s largest hydroelectric gravity dam as saying that some nonstructural, peripheral parts of the dam had buckled.
…
The deformation occurred last Saturday when the flood from western provinces including Sichuan and Chongqing along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River peaked at a record-setting 61,000 cubic meters per second, according to China Three Gorges Corporation, a state-owned enterprise that manages the dam and the sprawling power plant underneath it.
Government officials have long defended the $24-billion project as a major source of renewable power for an energy-hungry nation and as a way to prevent floods downstream. When complete, the dam will generate 18,000 megawatts of power—eight times that of the U.S.’s Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. But in September, the government official in charge of the project admitted that Three Gorges held “hidden dangers” that could breed disaster. “We can’t lower our guard,” Wang Xiaofeng, who oversees the project for China’s State Council, said during a meeting of Chinese scientists and government reps in Chongqing, an independent municipality of around 31 million abutting the dam. “We simply cannot sacrifice the environment in exchange for temporary economic gain.”
The comments appeared to confirm what geologists, biologists and environmentalists had been warning about for years: building a massive hydropower dam in an area that is heavily populated, home to threatened animal and plant species, and crossed by geologic fault lines is a recipe for disaster.
There is little in the western media about this failure, but Chinese language news sites have some details. The location is reported to be Jiajiadian Village, Guizhou Town, Zigui County, Hubei Province, on the banks of the Three Gorges Reservoir. Reports indicate that the landslide has a volume of about 800,000 cubic metres.
The context for this landslide is a spell of very heavy rainfall that has been affecting a large area of China. To manage downstream flooding, the Three Gorges Dam has been used to store water, but in the last two days the gates have been opened to create new storage capacity ahead of the next round of rainfall. This raises the possibility that the landslide might have been associated with the twin effects of local soil saturation and drawdown of the lake. It is interesting to note that in the video, as shown in the still below, there appears to be some freeboard in the reservoir:-
A much larger rainfall or Earthquake triggered landslide inside the geologically unstable reservoir region could generate a colossal tsunami shockwave, which could smash the dam wall like throwing a bucket of water at a sand castle. Landslide Tsunamis can be enormous – the Alaskan Taan Fjord landslide Tsunami in 2015 was over 600ft high. I’m not sure what kinds of forces an impact from a 600ft Tsunami generates, but I’m guessing the dam wall would not hold in such circumstances.
I don’t know how likely such a landslide is in the Three Gorges region – but given the unstable geology of the region, I do not believe the risk of a landslide driven mega tsunami or even a regular Earthquake which shatters the wall supports should be entirely discounted.
Obviously there is no way to know if this will be the year the Three Gorges dam collapses. People have been hi-lighting the problems with the dam and warning of the risk of collapse for decades, yet the dam is still there. But I would not be keen to live down water of such a structure.
I wonder what it costs to insure factories or realestate in the Yangtze Delta against flood risk? Perhaps someone in China can tell us – a sizeable fraction of China’s population, and around a quarter of China’s most important economic assets, are located down river of the Three Gorges Dam in the Yangtze Delta.
No doubt when, not if, the Three Gorges Dam finally collapses, climate change will be blamed.
It is a real problem having to rely on Falun Gong associated sources.JJ McCullogh, a Canadian YouTuber, has several posts on the church. It makes the organization come across like a cross between The Unification Church, Scientology, and a Chinese version of the Fourth Reich.
However, the Chinese Communist Party is rather worse, and it makes Western politicians seem compulsively honest and well intentioned.
Similar to having to rely on the Texas Tribune. Local paper has a story today from Texas Tribune. Why mass outages continue
It doesn’t talk about how overhead power lines are at risk from wind, trees and ice. How it can be difficult to reach some utility poles and downed lines to repair and replace. How wind and solar create an unstable electric grid.
It rather spews lies, exaggerations and inaccuracies blaming it all on climate change.
JJMcCullough is an idiot and a poser, his videos are frequently wrong on several subjects and his exaggerated pronunciation, supposedly a Canadian accent, is as fake as he is.
California is now experiencing drought again. There hasn’t been any rain and a heat dome is causing extreme temperatures, evaporating what little moisture there was available and increasing fire danger. This is consistent with the predictions of climate change.
There you go. Climate change.
It happens every year here in summer, but never mind that.
In the winter in California it rains hard for a week at a time, multiple times, so it evens out.
I guess so-called “Climate Change”, that is only 30 years worth of weather, which is always changing, will be blamed for the droughts and the floods…
The UN that has the biggest voice on the planet and its World Meteorological Organization redefined the word “climate” to mean 30 years of weather, instead of the thousands to millions of years most people were taught in school, I guess to match the UN/IPCC models time frame.
It is seldom mentioned in the media that the word “”climate” has been redefined to mean 30 years of weather.
The 30-year span is as false as 97%, 1.5, and buy 2 get 3rd one free.
The usage began prior as a way for media (press & radio) to report averages for local conditions, and more. “Climate change” investigations were not significant. The International Meteorological Organization (IMO), was a nongovernmental organization founded in 1873 as a forum for exchanging weather data and research. In Warsaw (1935), the Council of Directors adopted the 30-year span and used “NORMAL” as a definition of a moving 30 year average.
Note, this was before modern computers, and before the UN was established in June 1945.
But Texas is having glorious weather with below average temperatures and above average rain in the middle of the traditionally hottest and driest part of the year.
Let’s hope that Kerry has just as much success in this new role as he had in his last job as Climate Czar.
rbabcock
July 20, 2024 11:12 am
At least it wasn’t built by the Russians, which would put the likelihood right up there. But then at the time it was built, there might have been Russian help in the design and construction.
… and maintained by ‘updates’ from Crowdstrike … LOL
David Wojick
July 20, 2024 11:27 am
My first career was doing large dam stability analyses for the US Flood Control Program (until NEPA put us out of business). I see no cause for concern so far here. The Chinese are very good engineers.
On the tsunami front that actually happened in Italy, in the 60’s as I recall. The wave was 300+ feet higher than the dam when it passed over but the dam held nicely. And yes rapid drawdown can easily cause landslides but they are usually small.
Note that hydro dams and flood control dams are opposites. In flood control you keep the pool low to catch big floods. In hydro you keep the pool high to maximize power output which is a function of the height of the water above the turbine.
If Three Gorges is a hybrid then it would catch small floods but not big ones like this. It would be designed to pass through big floods which is what it is doing. I see no word that they are even using the emergency spillway.
Another type of dam are those built for water supply.
We “controlled” the dam that supplied our water plant.
But in flood conditions, we did our best to avoid flooding downstream and upstream while still preserving the integrity of the dam itself.
Yes but the italian dam was in a very narrow gorge, only 500 feet wide, anchored securely by very hard rock, and was a concave design. the 3 gorges dam is 15x as wide, a straight design, and surrounded by much poorer geology. Not a good comparison.
Whilst it is not clear if the 800,000 cubic metres is the total volume of the landslide or the volume that entered the water, irrespective, with a surface area of 1045 square kilometres it would be difficult to detect any change in the dam water level, and unlike an undersea plate movement that can cause a tsunami, the landslide would be a relatively gentle process.
It’s the splash that makes the so-called “tsunami” if all the 800,000 cubic metres hit the water all at once. This can happen if the “landslide” is really a rock slide that drops in one chunk. As you point out, after the splash wave moves on, the equilibrium water level is not notably changed.
Total cost of Three Gorges dam construction and operation to date
+ total cost of damages (not including lose of life) from flooding upstream and downstream of the dam to date
– total revenue from sale of electricity produced by the dam since it became operational
= XXX.
There are also the benefits of reduced downstream flood damages which may be quite large. Plus reservoirs have valuable uses including transportation, water supply and recreation.
Once upon a time I was lead author of the regulations governing cost-benefit analysis of federal water projects. Fun stuff.
So you’re one of those “recovering bureaucrats” I hear about? I have a friend, spent a large portion of his life writing legislation, then he retired, and that’s how he has described himself ever since.
Here’s the Google Earth image. I suspect if there was a problem with buckling China would have long since anchored enormous hydraulic jacks and additional fixings to correct the deformation.
There was no buckling. This part of the structure is almost 2 km long and 100 m wide at the surface, and its made of reinforced concrete. This is literally one of the biggest engineering structures in the world. At least in one occasion the composite satellite picture was badly “composited”, and those OSINT people who are usually completely clueless thought that was real buckling, and the Western propaganda media, always going along the “China bad, SeeSeePee bad” line, well, went along with it.
After reading the comments I get the feeling that not many care if the dam breaks. I find it curious that the MSM have such a studied disinterest in flooding in China or in any o the myriad other environmental peculiarities there.
They have already done that but since this would be an extremely grave war crime they tried to do it in an unofficial way. China made sure they would be pursuing reunification even harder after that. BTW according to international law Taiwan is part of the People’s Republic of China, this is official US policy as well, however strange this seems to most people here.
Right- and as for all the protests about Israel hammering Gaza, I suspect they’d stop the second Hamas unconditionally surrenders. That’s what we told Germany and Japan they had to do. One thing nobody seems to notice. America’s population is about 37 times that of Israel. So, it would be as if Mexico invaded America and killed 37×1,400= 51K people. I think at Pearl Harbor about 2,400 people were killed yet we trashed Japan over that- and nobody said don’t hurt any civilians. When a few thousand Americans were killed on 9/11- we went to war for 20 years. I’m not saying that was a great idea- that’s how nations react. So, Hamas, hang up your white flag!
It is a real problem having to rely on Falun Gong associated sources.JJ McCullogh, a Canadian YouTuber, has several posts on the church. It makes the organization come across like a cross between The Unification Church, Scientology, and a Chinese version of the Fourth Reich.
However, the Chinese Communist Party is rather worse, and it makes Western politicians seem compulsively honest and well intentioned.
Similar to having to rely on the Texas Tribune. Local paper has a story today from Texas Tribune. Why mass outages continue
It doesn’t talk about how overhead power lines are at risk from wind, trees and ice. How it can be difficult to reach some utility poles and downed lines to repair and replace. How wind and solar create an unstable electric grid.
It rather spews lies, exaggerations and inaccuracies blaming it all on climate change.
JJMcCullough is an idiot and a poser, his videos are frequently wrong on several subjects and his exaggerated pronunciation, supposedly a Canadian accent, is as fake as he is.
Are you Falun Gong?
It is a real problem having to rely on Falun Gong associated sources. … Hence the cautionary note.
Heard on the nightly news last night:
California is now experiencing drought again. There hasn’t been any rain and a heat dome is causing extreme temperatures, evaporating what little moisture there was available and increasing fire danger.
This is consistent with the predictions of climate change.
There you go. Climate change.
It happens every year here in summer, but never mind that.
It also somehow seems consistent with SUMMER
In the winter in California it rains hard for a week at a time, multiple times, so it evens out.
I guess so-called “Climate Change”, that is only 30 years worth of weather, which is always changing, will be blamed for the droughts and the floods…
The UN that has the biggest voice on the planet and its World Meteorological Organization redefined the word “climate” to mean 30 years of weather, instead of the thousands to millions of years most people were taught in school, I guess to match the UN/IPCC models time frame.
It is seldom mentioned in the media that the word “”climate” has been redefined to mean 30 years of weather.
The 30-year span is as false as 97%, 1.5, and buy 2 get 3rd one free.
The usage began prior as a way for media (press & radio) to report averages for local conditions, and more. “Climate change” investigations were not significant. The International Meteorological Organization (IMO), was a nongovernmental organization founded in 1873 as a forum for exchanging weather data and research. In Warsaw (1935), the Council of Directors adopted the 30-year span and used “NORMAL” as a definition of a moving 30 year average.
Note, this was before modern computers, and before the UN was established in June 1945.
Foggy early morning here. Middle of summer.
Must be climate change.
Bloody cold here in my part of the UK. Middle of summer.
Must be global warming.
It is also consistent with the predictions by someone who made it up.
But Texas is having glorious weather with below average temperatures and above average rain in the middle of the traditionally hottest and driest part of the year.
62 degree F dew point and 72 deg F air temperature yesterday morning in the DFW area … made for a very pleasant 6 AM bicycle ride.
Wake me when they can tell me what isn’t consistent with climate change predictions.
3 Gorges Dam was “deformed” long before these rains. A large center section of the dam moved downstream immediately after it was built and put to use.
I’m surprised such a major problem and it didn’t threaten a collapse of the dam.
Well, the Grauniad has
British Museum
Chinese artefacts in repatriation row were ‘given willingly’ to British Museum. https://amp.theguardian.com/culture/article/2024/jul/20/chinese-artefacts-in-repatriation-row-were-given-willingly-to-british-museum
And the Waffen BBC is no better.
Why? Check the narrative
O/T. I thought Kerry was working on the Biden campaign?
John Kerry will soon step down from his role to work on President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, officials have told US media.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67972148
A ghost campaigner?
Let’s hope that Kerry has just as much success in this new role as he had in his last job as Climate Czar.
At least it wasn’t built by the Russians, which would put the likelihood right up there. But then at the time it was built, there might have been Russian help in the design and construction.
Or built by DEI
re: “Or built by DEI”
… and maintained by ‘updates’ from Crowdstrike … LOL
My first career was doing large dam stability analyses for the US Flood Control Program (until NEPA put us out of business). I see no cause for concern so far here. The Chinese are very good engineers.
On the tsunami front that actually happened in Italy, in the 60’s as I recall. The wave was 300+ feet higher than the dam when it passed over but the dam held nicely. And yes rapid drawdown can easily cause landslides but they are usually small.
Note that hydro dams and flood control dams are opposites. In flood control you keep the pool low to catch big floods. In hydro you keep the pool high to maximize power output which is a function of the height of the water above the turbine.
If Three Gorges is a hybrid then it would catch small floods but not big ones like this. It would be designed to pass through big floods which is what it is doing. I see no word that they are even using the emergency spillway.
Another type of dam are those built for water supply.
We “controlled” the dam that supplied our water plant.
But in flood conditions, we did our best to avoid flooding downstream and upstream while still preserving the integrity of the dam itself.
Here is the tsunami story. A very big “landslide” actually the side of Mt Toc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam
Let’s hope Three Gorges also holds if a similar event occurs.
Yes but the italian dam was in a very narrow gorge, only 500 feet wide, anchored securely by very hard rock, and was a concave design. the 3 gorges dam is 15x as wide, a straight design, and surrounded by much poorer geology. Not a good comparison.
Whilst it is not clear if the 800,000 cubic metres is the total volume of the landslide or the volume that entered the water, irrespective, with a surface area of 1045 square kilometres it would be difficult to detect any change in the dam water level, and unlike an undersea plate movement that can cause a tsunami, the landslide would be a relatively gentle process.
It’s the splash that makes the so-called “tsunami” if all the 800,000 cubic metres hit the water all at once. This can happen if the “landslide” is really a rock slide that drops in one chunk. As you point out, after the splash wave moves on, the equilibrium water level is not notably changed.
Please help me with the math here:
Total cost of Three Gorges dam construction and operation to date
+ total cost of damages (not including lose of life) from flooding upstream and downstream of the dam to date
– total revenue from sale of electricity produced by the dam since it became operational
= XXX.
Is XXX a positive or negative number?
Should we care?
There are also the benefits of reduced downstream flood damages which may be quite large. Plus reservoirs have valuable uses including transportation, water supply and recreation.
Once upon a time I was lead author of the regulations governing cost-benefit analysis of federal water projects. Fun stuff.
So you’re one of those “recovering bureaucrats” I hear about? I have a friend, spent a large portion of his life writing legislation, then he retired, and that’s how he has described himself ever since.
the math is this: the CCP wanted to build it, so it was built.
800,000 M^3 sounds like a lot, but it’s only 1/1250 of a cubic kilometer or about 1/48,000 of the 39 cubic km pond.
Or think of it as 800,000 tons of water. Only 8 carriers, and only 2 of the largest tanker ships ever built.
____________________________________________________
So how many million people live in that township?
If I had any choice at all… I would not be living anywhere downstream of this dam !
Unfortunately, many in China do not have that choice.
Let’s all hope and pray that it holds. !
These photos show distortion of 3 gorges occurring in 2020. Is it real or a doctored photo? I dont know.
Doctored.
maybe not intentionally though.
IIRC it ended up being at the join of 3 satellite images, and was just put together very badly.
Here’s the Google Earth image. I suspect if there was a problem with buckling China would have long since anchored enormous hydraulic jacks and additional fixings to correct the deformation.
There was no buckling. This part of the structure is almost 2 km long and 100 m wide at the surface, and its made of reinforced concrete. This is literally one of the biggest engineering structures in the world. At least in one occasion the composite satellite picture was badly “composited”, and those OSINT people who are usually completely clueless thought that was real buckling, and the Western propaganda media, always going along the “China bad, SeeSeePee bad” line, well, went along with it.
This looks like 2008 picture, where are the other 2 concrete extensions coming out of the center?
Which other concrete extensions?
Why do I feel like this article is an evergreen?
Didn’t we do all of this FUD a few years ago?
The risk hasn’t gone away.
It is a HUGE dam, designed to hold back one of the largest rivers in the world.
Just hope they did their engineering with enough added safety margin..
NOT something you want to construct on a “budget” with substandard materials and practices. (not saying it was, btw)
China’s record is not great
Banqiao Dam anyone?
After reading the comments I get the feeling that not many care if the dam breaks. I find it curious that the MSM have such a studied disinterest in flooding in China or in any o the myriad other environmental peculiarities there.
C’mon . . . the flooding’s gotta be caused by climate change™, the MSM’s favorite whipping boy.
Taiwan should threaten to blow the dam with long range missiles- if China invades.
They have already done that but since this would be an extremely grave war crime they tried to do it in an unofficial way. China made sure they would be pursuing reunification even harder after that. BTW according to international law Taiwan is part of the People’s Republic of China, this is official US policy as well, however strange this seems to most people here.
It wouldn’t be a war crime if China invades Taiwan. It would be self defense. Was it a war crime when America carpet bombed Germany and Japan?
No. Neither was is a war crime when the US used two nuclear weapons on Japan to end WWII. Such is the “price” of waging war.
Right- and as for all the protests about Israel hammering Gaza, I suspect they’d stop the second Hamas unconditionally surrenders. That’s what we told Germany and Japan they had to do. One thing nobody seems to notice. America’s population is about 37 times that of Israel. So, it would be as if Mexico invaded America and killed 37×1,400= 51K people. I think at Pearl Harbor about 2,400 people were killed yet we trashed Japan over that- and nobody said don’t hurt any civilians. When a few thousand Americans were killed on 9/11- we went to war for 20 years. I’m not saying that was a great idea- that’s how nations react. So, Hamas, hang up your white flag!