Building the Three Gorges Dam in China

Building the Three Gorges Dam in China Narrator: The biggest hydroelectric dam in the world is being built on the Yangtze River in the three gorges in China. It will stretch almost 2 kilometers across the river entirely 185 meters of others. Its reservoir will extend back over 600 kilometers upstream is placing more than a million people. It called the Three Gorges Dam because it’s right as a point on the Yangtze River where it’s just caught through three beautiful narrow gorgeous 2/3 of the way down the river’s length to the sea. Pan Jiajing: The Three Gorges is a superb location to store enormous amounts of water. Cited at this bottleneck, it controlled the area of heaviest rainfall. Narrator: Floods, they’re the big danger in China. Historical records going back 2000 years suggest there was one flooding incident every two years. In 1998, several rivers assistance feeding the Yangtze overflowed their banks at the same time. Thousands died. More than a million people lost their homes and livestock. The Yangtze itself burst its banks in certain places. To save the cities, the authorities decided to explode the embankments protecting farmland, sacrificing fields to save the cities. The floods even threatened deep dark chain of oilfields, China’s cheap source of petroleum. In a race against time, the army saved them. It’s one reason why Chinese leaders have long dreamt of building a dam in the Three Gorges to stop flooding. In 1919, Dr. Sun Yat-Zen became China’s first republican president. He proposed the dam to generate power. But there was too much civil disorder in the new states to embark on anything so complex as a gigantic dam. Thirty years later, Mao Zedong became China’s first communist leader. He brought together experts by four and against the time. He himself wanted a dam, put in a foul mood when he first met one yellow comment of the day. Li Rui: When I go to the meeting in that name, I was warned against speaking out against the dam. People said Mao would tell against me if I did. I said that’s okay. No problem, no problem. Narrator: Mao was so taken by Li Rui’s recent opposition to the dam. He made him his secretary. Li Rui: I think that the anti-flooding project should always involve building embankments. Now the covered platform to store facilities at the Three Gorges is about 10 to 20 billion cubic meters of water. If we increase the heights of the embankments and the land reaches by third of a meter, it would be the equipment of building the Three Gorges reservoir. Pan Jiajing: In my opinion, it would be better to lower the embankments rather than raise them. This is because the embankments were not designed scientifically. In some areas, there are hundreds of years old. It could be filled with anything and the foundation is very weak less to find sand. They might be able to re-stand the short term increase of water levels but if exposed to high water level for long periods, they could collapse. So this method is not very realistic. Even if you raise all the embankment, one or two meters, the work, money and investment would far exceed the cost of the Three Gorges dam. And for this, we have concrete statistics.