With as much water as Lake Superior, the reservoir will stretch 385 miles east to west and more than one mile north to south and 600 feet deep. Unlike Lake Superior all of this water is held back from a lower flood plain by a single entity--the dam. This could be a spectacular flood if it breeched.
from:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2003Jun1.html
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China's Monumental Gamble
River Halted by Dam That Will Bring Power, or Untold Destruction
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 2, 2003; Page A11
ON THE YANGTZE RIVER, China, June 1 -- China halted the flow of the Yangtze River today and began filling what will be the world's biggest reservoir as part of a controversial $24 billion wager to generate clean energy and stop the deluges that have swept across central China for centuries.
Engineers blocked 19 of the 22 sluice gates on the Three Gorges Dam, located in the central province of Hubei. The water level began rising from 330 feet and will hit 445 feet in two weeks, ultimately reaching 577 feet when the dam, China's most formidable engineering feat since the construction of the Great Wall, is completed in 2009. Limited power generation is scheduled to begin in August.
With as much water as Lake Superior, the reservoir will stretch 385 miles east to west and more than one mile north to south. Two cities, 11 county seats and 1,352 villages will be submerged under its chocolate-colored flow.
To make room for the massive basin, more than 1.3 million people are being forced to leave their homes, a process that already has been fraught with corruption and complaints. An estimated $500 million is being spent to build more than 20 wastewater treatment plants along its banks. Nonetheless, environmental scientists are concerned that the reservoir will become little more than a cesspool for the 15 million people and thousands of factories nearby.
At a time when many countries around the world, including the United States, are dismantling dams faster than they are constructing them, China's project is emblematic of a political system run by builders. All nine members of the Communist Party's all-powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo were trained as engineers, and their faith in the power of man over nature remains unshaken. Li Peng, the former premier who championed the project in the early 1990s despite unprecedented opposition from the normally submissive parliament, was a hydrologist. The project and the Tiananmen Square crackdown he oversaw in 1989 constitute his legacy.
The project fulfills a dream held by people as varied as U.S. Army engineers who surveyed the region in the 1940s, and Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, who wrote in 1956: "Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west. . . . The mountain goddess will marvel at a world so changed."
Fashioned from white stone, the dam straddles the Yangtze and measures 7,600 feet across and 600 feet high. With a series of record-high locks on the north side of the structure, the dam will open up Chongqing, China's largest urban area, home to 30 million people, to ocean-going vessels 2,539 miles from where the Yangtze pours into the Pacific Ocean near Shanghai.
The dam project highlights the willingness of the Communist Party to take enormous risks with citizens throughout its 54-year reign. A disastrous economic program designed to propel China past Britain in the late 1950s left 30 million people dead of starvation. China has tested nuclear weapons near farming villages in the Taklimakan Desert. In the current, furious bout of multibillion-dollar development in Chongqing, with tunnels, bridges and highways, workers have actually threaded part of a light-rail network through an office tower perched on one of the city's precarious ledges. China's government recently gambled that severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, was not a serious disease and would disappear.
The risks inherent in the Three Gorges project span the spectrum, from social ills to science, finance to geology.
Forecasts made by government economists in the 1990s about the cost of electrical power are now considered too high, so it is unclear whether the dam, which is expected to significantly exceed its $24 billion price tag, will make any money. The dam will ultimately be able to crank out 18,200 megawatts of energy a year, the equivalent of 26 nuclear power plants or 10 big coal-fired power stations burning 50 million tons of coal. But electricity prices in China have plummeted in the last several years as more power plants have come on line.
Small cracks have already been discovered in the dam's structure. Officials have been arrested for providing construction companies with shoddy materials.
The dam is believed to sit on stable ground, but the land that holds the reservoir is so vulnerable to landslides that tour boat operators point out famous landslide sites along the route to the Three Gorges. The city of Fengjie, which is being submerged by the reservoir, has been moved twice because part of the first site risked slipping into the river, officials said.
The prospect of an environmental disaster also petrifies some experts. Each year, the area around Chongqing will dump 12.4 billion cubic feet of wastewater and 14.1 billion cubic feet of industrial waste into the reservoir, enough to fill it with muck in 50 years. An additional 21.2 billion cubic feet of silt will roll into the lake, creating what some engineers predict will be a mountain-size headache for the 36 energy-generating turbines at the dam below.
In recent years, the government has acknowledged the brewing environmental disaster and is taking steps to ensure that the reservoir does not become a cesspool. The World Bank is backing Chongqing's effort to centralize 600 waste outtake pipes through two main water treatment plants, a huge feat in this mountainous city.
"There is a big change in the attitude of the government," said Zhou Lin Jun, a senior official working on the World Bank project team. "In the past the bank pushed us to do environmental projects. Now we're doing them ourselves."
But environmentalists say it might be too late. For one, 60 percent of the waste entering the reservoir comes from sources that can't be treated, such as fields laden with fertilizer and insecticide. Of the 90 tributaries entering the reservoir, 60 are now considered heavily polluted.
Along the river, the water has already been rising slowly for weeks, covering the islands and reefs that dot the river and crawling up the river's verdant banks. Soon, it will submerge graveyards and old temples, the sites of countless poems by China's masters from its imperial past. Hundreds of thousands of workers up and down the river are engaged in a furious battle to prepare for the rising lake.
The old city of Fengjie, 394 miles downriver from Chongqing, resembles a war zone. Miles of streets and houses have been knocked down and a new city has been hacked out of the cliffs above. On Saturday, dozens of scrawny farmers and their children rooted among the rubble for metal scraps, an old tire, soda cans or plastic bags.
Thousands of people have been moved from the old city and from villages near it. While the government insists their lives have improved, it appears that the move has generally benefited government workers and members of the Communist Party, who have been given preferential housing and secure jobs.
"The average people are being treated badly," said Du Xiaoshan, 60, a farmer who was forced to leave his orange groves and vegetable fields and now ekes out a living picking through trash in Fengjie. "The water is going to take my livelihood away from me. Farming oranges is all I know."
Already the water's rise has prompted unexpected consequences. Millions of water rats have scampered up the banks, seeking succor in the new towns. That has sparked a mass campaign to kill them, and their carcasses, laden with poison, will now roll back into the reservoir.
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