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Wednesday 17 December 2008
Temple move highlights major challenges as waters rise behind Three Gorges Dam
“This is the reality about the Three Gorges Dam. It may be a first-class infrastructure project, but it is located in one of the poorest mountainous regions in the world.”
Temple move highlights major challenges as waters rise behind Three Gorges Dam
Shi Jiangtao in Beijing 16 December 2008
A few hours downriver from Chongqing, the newly relocated village of Longan is famed as the new home of a 1,700-year-old temple dedicated to warrior Zhang Fei of the Three Kingdoms period.
At a cost of 40 million yuan (HK$45.4 million), the temple was moved stone by stone from a site swallowed by the Three Gorges’ Dam reservoir and is one of the few historical treasures saved.
Mainland authorities point to the relocation as part of the engineering triumph of the dam, but the villagers say they have lost fertile land to the rebuilt temple and the reservoir over the past decade, without adequate compensation. And now they suffer from another problem inherent in big dams: landslides.
“We never had serious landslides before the Zhang Fei Temple was moved here,” said resident He Tianfu, 75. “But now it’s getting worse despite repair work.”
The dam has been touted as the country’s top prestige project of the past three decades. With 22,500 megawatts of generating capacity, ability to tame the flood-prone Yangtze, and a lake of more than 1,000 sq km, the benefits of the 185-metre-tall concrete dam seem all too obvious.
But the project - which took decades to propose, two weeks to get approval from the country’s rubber-stamp parliament, and more than 14 years and tens of billions of dollars to build - has been a magnet for controversy from its outset.
Mainland media have repeatedly reported on the temple’s fate since the reservoir began filling in 2003. It was forced to close after a landslide hit the area in summer last year, highlighting one of the most widespread problems in the dam’s catchment.
Experts said the damming of the waterway had dealt a blow to the delicate geological balance of the Yangtze by saturating already unstable mountainsides, leaving residents more vulnerable. The area had seen a sharp rise in deadly landsides and other hazards, but the worst was yet to come, they warned.
“Geological problems are far more severe than we had imagined,” said Chen Guojie, a scientist at Chengdu’s Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment.
Like several innate problems plaguing the dam, repairing landslides has long been considered by the project’s opponents as an almost impossible mission. But new problems have emerged with the rising waters, including the seasonal fluctuations in water levels, which see the reservoir rise and fall by up to 30 metres every six months.
“The annual cycle of flooding and receding water will be the main headache, as most counties and towns and scenic spots are located near the affected areas,” Chongqing University professor Lei Hengshun said.
A former National People’s Congress delegate who was one of the critics of the dam’s construction in 1992, Professor Lei said the fluctuation problem was completely overlooked during feasibility studies.
Former water resources minister Wang Shucheng also expressed concerns about the fluctuations, ecological hazards and the grave consequences on downstream embankments of the clear, faster flow of water discharged by the dam.
He questioned the project’s feasibility and the much-touted flood-control effects, saying that building several smaller dams on the Yangtze’s tributaries would have been a better way to tame the river.
Officials in Chongqing and the downstream province of Hubei are worried about the decline in water quality in the tributaries - hit annually by algal outbreaks. Despite Beijing spending tens of billions of dollars to build sewage-treatment works, nearly a billion tonnes of mostly untreated waste water from factories and homes and more than 2 million tonnes of trash were dumped into the lake last year, according to the Environment Ministry.
Governments have promised more funds to control the pollution. Chongqing authorities said they had spent 50 billion yuan in the past decade to ease growing concerns and planned to invest 50 billion yuan more by 2010. But Professor Chen said the spending was not as effective as expected, citing poor technology, bureaucratic bickering and graft.
He and many experts, such as the former head of the Yangtze River Water Resources Protection Commission, Weng Lida, have suggested authorities postpone plans to raise the water to its maximum height this year until the many tough problems are properly dealt with.
“Apart from power-generating authorities’ eagerness driven by profits, I don’t see any other reason the waters should be raised in such haste,” Professor Chen said.
But owner and developer China Three Gorges Project Corporation is raising levels as planned.
Like all mainland hydropower projects, resettlement of displaced residents remains a headache.
Official statistics showed that population density in the reservoir region was 2.5 times the national average and more than four times the levels of other mountainous regions.
Professor Chen said: “I have always argued that the shrinking environmental capacity in the region after the reservoir was filled would be far from enough to support the huge population” - more than 20 million.
It is also an open secret that the livelihoods of a lot of those displaced worsened after resettlement, with many forced to return to their partially submerged hometowns.
Experts warned that the mishandling of public grievances and a stagnant economy would become threats to stability and evolve into bigger social and political problems.
“Local authorities have been caught in a dilemma. They want to boost the economy by attracting chemical factories and other polluting industries, but the region is already too polluted for them,” Professor Chen said.
“This is the reality about the Three Gorges Dam. It may be a first-class infrastructure project, but it is located in one of the poorest mountainous regions in the world.”
1 comment:
Temple move highlights major challenges as waters rise behind Three Gorges Dam
Shi Jiangtao in Beijing
16 December 2008
A few hours downriver from Chongqing, the newly relocated village of Longan is famed as the new home of a 1,700-year-old temple dedicated to warrior Zhang Fei of the Three Kingdoms period.
At a cost of 40 million yuan (HK$45.4 million), the temple was moved stone by stone from a site swallowed by the Three Gorges’ Dam reservoir and is one of the few historical treasures saved.
Mainland authorities point to the relocation as part of the engineering triumph of the dam, but the villagers say they have lost fertile land to the rebuilt temple and the reservoir over the past decade, without adequate compensation. And now they suffer from another problem inherent in big dams: landslides.
“We never had serious landslides before the Zhang Fei Temple was moved here,” said resident He Tianfu, 75. “But now it’s getting worse despite repair work.”
The dam has been touted as the country’s top prestige project of the past three decades. With 22,500 megawatts of generating capacity, ability to tame the flood-prone Yangtze, and a lake of more than 1,000 sq km, the benefits of the 185-metre-tall concrete dam seem all too obvious.
But the project - which took decades to propose, two weeks to get approval from the country’s rubber-stamp parliament, and more than 14 years and tens of billions of dollars to build - has been a magnet for controversy from its outset.
Mainland media have repeatedly reported on the temple’s fate since the reservoir began filling in 2003. It was forced to close after a landslide hit the area in summer last year, highlighting one of the most widespread problems in the dam’s catchment.
Experts said the damming of the waterway had dealt a blow to the delicate geological balance of the Yangtze by saturating already unstable mountainsides, leaving residents more vulnerable. The area had seen a sharp rise in deadly landsides and other hazards, but the worst was yet to come, they warned.
“Geological problems are far more severe than we had imagined,” said Chen Guojie, a scientist at Chengdu’s Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment.
Like several innate problems plaguing the dam, repairing landslides has long been considered by the project’s opponents as an almost impossible mission. But new problems have emerged with the rising waters, including the seasonal fluctuations in water levels, which see the reservoir rise and fall by up to 30 metres every six months.
“The annual cycle of flooding and receding water will be the main headache, as most counties and towns and scenic spots are located near the affected areas,” Chongqing University professor Lei Hengshun said.
A former National People’s Congress delegate who was one of the critics of the dam’s construction in 1992, Professor Lei said the fluctuation problem was completely overlooked during feasibility studies.
Former water resources minister Wang Shucheng also expressed concerns about the fluctuations, ecological hazards and the grave consequences on downstream embankments of the clear, faster flow of water discharged by the dam.
He questioned the project’s feasibility and the much-touted flood-control effects, saying that building several smaller dams on the Yangtze’s tributaries would have been a better way to tame the river.
Officials in Chongqing and the downstream province of Hubei are worried about the decline in water quality in the tributaries - hit annually by algal outbreaks. Despite Beijing spending tens of billions of dollars to build sewage-treatment works, nearly a billion tonnes of mostly untreated waste water from factories and homes and more than 2 million tonnes of trash were dumped into the lake last year, according to the Environment Ministry.
Governments have promised more funds to control the pollution. Chongqing authorities said they had spent 50 billion yuan in the past decade to ease growing concerns and planned to invest 50 billion yuan more by 2010. But Professor Chen said the spending was not as effective as expected, citing poor technology, bureaucratic bickering and graft.
He and many experts, such as the former head of the Yangtze River Water Resources Protection Commission, Weng Lida, have suggested authorities postpone plans to raise the water to its maximum height this year until the many tough problems are properly dealt with.
“Apart from power-generating authorities’ eagerness driven by profits, I don’t see any other reason the waters should be raised in such haste,” Professor Chen said.
But owner and developer China Three Gorges Project Corporation is raising levels as planned.
Like all mainland hydropower projects, resettlement of displaced residents remains a headache.
Official statistics showed that population density in the reservoir region was 2.5 times the national average and more than four times the levels of other mountainous regions.
Professor Chen said: “I have always argued that the shrinking environmental capacity in the region after the reservoir was filled would be far from enough to support the huge population” - more than 20 million.
It is also an open secret that the livelihoods of a lot of those displaced worsened after resettlement, with many forced to return to their partially submerged hometowns.
Experts warned that the mishandling of public grievances and a stagnant economy would become threats to stability and evolve into bigger social and political problems.
“Local authorities have been caught in a dilemma. They want to boost the economy by attracting chemical factories and other polluting industries, but the region is already too polluted for them,” Professor Chen said.
“This is the reality about the Three Gorges Dam. It may be a first-class infrastructure project, but it is located in one of the poorest mountainous regions in the world.”
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