The 3 Gorges Dam in China sits on the 3rd largest river, called the Yangtze River. It now has the world’s largest hydro powered project in the river. It is infamous for being the most notorious dam. Why is it notorious?
1. It has displaced 1.2 million people from their homes.
2. It has flooded 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1,350 villages.
3. Human rights violations:
http://www.cleanganga.com/articles/feb03/human_rights.php
4. Environmental impact is profound. Scientist’ fears the weight of the water from the dam may be responsible for seismic activity; Causing frequent catastrophic earthquakes. Water weighs 8.34 lbs. per gallon. The dam holds about 10 trillion gallons of water. That is a lot of weight on our planets plate system. Consider tectonic plates. They get stuck on each other and temporarily absorb the continuing pressure of subsurface movement, but the plates eventually snap back into a sustainable position. The result on the earth's surface is often a devastating earthquake or tsunami.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HetgsONTvSM
This is one dam that is 5 times the size of the Hoover dam, in Nevada. I visited the Hoover dam, and they boast that they have so much cement in the Hoover dam; it is equivalent to a 2 lane highway from New York City to California’s coast (over 3,000 miles of road) with enough cement left over to make sidewalks on each side of the highway. That is a LOT of cement. They are now working on 2 other dams they call sisters, to the 3 Gorge Dam.
The 3 Gorge Dam is 1 ½ miles wide, 600 ft. high; it will create reservoirs over 360 ft. above the river level downstream, or 574 ft. from sea level, This will travel over 400 miles behind the dam. The engineers say this will allow 10,000 ton ocean going freighters into this area for 6 months out of the year. This will open up a new and growing agricultural & manufacturing region. (Cheaper prices at Walmart!!)
Dam’s are bad for rivers because it keeps fish from swimming upstream to spawn, it causes stagnant water, and these reservoirs can retain old polluted sediment.
Sediment can be useful to enrich soil if flowing. Floods would enrich the soil with this sediment for agriculture purposes along the rivers. It becomes a thick stinky mud substance when stagnant, collecting all the pollutants and creating many environmental problems. With the dams, this eliminates flooding or it is a catastrophic flood that breeches the levy.
In the case of the 3 Gorge Dam it has swallowed up, so much land, with so many polluted factories. The pollution and stagnant water has created a mess, to say the least. Think about a few big cities in America, take Flint and Detroit areas for example: (China has very little environmental safety control in their government) If Flint and Detroit was covered over with water hundreds of feet high I would think the pollution here would be pretty bad with all the car factories in it with environmental safety controls here. Do you think the water sitting hundreds of feet above these cities would be clean? Now China’s lacking the environmental safety requirement’s that our country has. Besides the problems of MAJOR EARTHQUAKES think what all these little factories there has done to that river. Think what would happen if one of those earthquakes breaks this dam!! This not only would flood out and kill millions; it would poison the land afterwards.
I heard of this dam and the problems and thought it interesting. I haven't covered much on this dam but hopefully I, peeked your interest in it.
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