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Posted 2007-08-14, 04:11 PM
in reply to !King_Amazon!'s post starting "It's karma paying them back for..."
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Maybe Karma will may the Three Gorges Dam will break when the reservoir is full.
Wikipedia said:
There are two hazards uniquely identified with the dam:[23] One is that sedimentation modeling is unverified and the other is that the dam sits on a seismic fault.
Excessive sedimentation can block the sluice gates which can cause dam failure under some conditions. This was a contributing cause of the Banqiao Dam failure in 1975 that precipitated the failure of 61 other dams and resulted in over 200,000 deaths. Critics believe that the Yangtze will add 530 million tons of silt into the reservoir on average per year; in time, this silt would pile up behind the walls of the dam, clogging the turbines' entranceway. Further, the absence of silt down stream would have two dramatic effects:
Unburdened by silt, the Yangtze below the dam would flow more quickly. This, in turn, would cause the river to scour the banks and riverbed more severely, even to the point of altering the character and predictability of the river itself. In addition, flood diversion dikes along the river would require expensive and continual re-strengthening and rebuilding.
The city of Shanghai, more than one thousand miles (1600 km) away from the dam, rests on a massive plain of sediment. The "arriving silt -- so long as it does arrive -- strengthens the bed on which Shanghai is built... the less the tonnage of arriving sentiment the more vulnerable is this biggest of Chinese cities to inundation..." [24]
Also, the weight of the dam and reservoir can theoretically cause induced seismicity, as happened with the Katse Dam in Lesotho. Yet others point out that similar criticism, purely theoretical in nature, have never been leveled at other "mega-dams" such as the Nile's Aswan Dam or the Itaipu Dam in Brazil.
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They have such a good track record:
The Banqiao Reservoir Dam (Chinese: 板桥水库大坝; Pinyin: Bǎnqiáo Shuǐkù Dàbà) and Shimantan Reservoir Dam (Chinese: 石漫滩水库大坝; Pinyin: Shímàntān Shuǐkù Dàbà) are among 62 dams in Zhumadian Prefecture of China's Henan Province that failed catastrophically or were intentionally destroyed in 1975 during Typhoon Nina.
Last edited by Willkillforfood; 2007-08-14 at 04:14 PM.
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