Tuesday, November 6, 2007

3 Gorges Dam - Bit of a Disaster

This interesting article states that the Chinese leadership is backing away from the 3 Gorges dam, doing the Bart thing: "Wasn't me!"

I had followed this right from the beginning. At the time, our geotechnical department was very friendly with the Chinese, and we had talks about the project. Eventually, our manager left the company, and went over to do a lot of work on it. The most amazing thing was the huge unstable slide areas over all the gorges, and these might be activated by the project. Each one of these slides could sent a giant wave that would overtop the dam! Of course, none of this stopped the dang thing from being built.

Now, the cyclic water level changes is activating one of these slides. I was surprised to read that it actually rumbled like an earthquake! Now, that's one heck of a slide! These things can't be stabilized by a California pin job, so it's just a matter of time...

2 comments:

Monado said...

It's been an ecological disaster in the making from Day One. I'm not surprised to hear it's an engineering / geology disaster as well.

Harold Asmis said...

I just found a tour of the Vaiont Slide, which is exactly what will happen here.


Vaiont Slide