hebig.org/blog
personal webnode of Haiko Hebig

Washington Post: "River Halted by Dam That Will Bring Power, or Untold Destruction - 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."

More coverage at The Guardian, The Voice of America and SwissInfo