In this article from today’s Washington Post we learn that the largest dam in the world is nearing completion. It will save many lives, as almost three hundred thousand people have lost theirs since the 1930’s due to flooding this dam will stop by being able to hold back more water than Lake Superior.
Here is an excerpt.
China's Symbol, and Source, of Power
Three Gorges Dam Nears Completion, at High Human Cost
By Edward Cody Washington Post Foreign ServiceThursday, May 18, 2006; A01
THREE GORGES DAM, China, May 17 -- After 13 years of breakneck construction that displaced more than a million villagers, China is about to pour the final concrete on an enormous dam across the mighty Yangtze River, seeking to tame the flood-prone waterway that has nurtured and tormented the Chinese people for 5,000 years.
Engineers, many of whom have spent their entire careers on the site, will gather on Saturday for a ceremony to mark their achievement: The dun-colored barrier at last has reached its full height of 606 feet and stretches 7,575 feet across the Yangtze's murky green waters in the Three Gorges area of central China's Hubei province, 600 miles southwest of Beijing.
The Three Gorges Project, with 25,000 workers and a budget of $24 billion, is China's most ambitious engineering undertaking since the Great Wall. It has replaced Brazil's Itaipu Dam as the world's largest hydroelectric and flood-control installation, Chinese officials said, with the strength to hold back more water than Lake Superior and power 26 generators to churn out 85 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year when the final touches are completed in 2008. Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona border, by comparison, generates more than 4 billion kilowatt-hours a year.
"This is the grandest project the Chinese people have undertaken in thousands of years," said Li Yong'an, general manager of the government's Three Gorges corporation, which runs the project under the direct leadership of Premier Wen Jiabao.
In its scope and ambition -- as well as its human costs -- the Three Gorges Project has become a symbol of China's relentless energy and determination to take its place among the world's great economic powers. At the same time, the project has demonstrated the Communist Party's willingness to sacrifice individual rights for the country's general welfare and to take high-stake risks in the name of progress.
The Chinese have long dreamed of a dam across the Yangtze to alleviate flooding and facilitate navigation. Sun Yat-sen, revered as the founder of the Chinese republic, urged construction of a dam as early as 1918. U.S. engineers suggested one right after World War II. Mao Zedong, whose Communist Party took over in 1949, wrote seven years later that "walls of stone" should rise from the river.
It was left to the present-day Communist leadership, dominated by engineers and driven to build, to put the project into motion. Li Peng, a former waterworks official, got the project off the ground in the late 1980s when he was premier. The first earth was turned in 1993 under the president at the time, Jiang Zemin, a Soviet-educated engineer. The dam's completion is now being celebrated under President Hu Jintao, who was trained as a hydraulic engineer and has adopted "scientific development" as a mantra.
But critics of the project -- they are many, in China and abroad -- have questioned whether building a giant dam is really scientific in the 21st century, when the United States and other nations are weighing the wisdom of damming their rivers. Despite the $24 billion price tag, they note, the Three Gorges Dam will produce only 2 percent of China's electricity by 2010. Moreover, environmentalists have warned that the backup of water behind the dam could end up as a giant waste-collection pool for Chongqing, China's largest urban conglomeration about 250 miles upstream.
"There are two sides to everything, and the Three Gorges Project is no exception," said Cao Guangjing, the building company's deputy manager. "But many studies, undertaken since the beginning, have shown that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages."
The government has set aside $5 billion to build sewage treatment plants around Chongqing and other upstream cities to prevent the river from turning into a cesspool, officials pointed out. Tests so far show that the water quality has not suffered, even though water has been backing up for several years, they said.
