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(BEIJING) -- China's government said it evacuated the last town to be submerged under the giant reservoir created by the Three Gorges Dam, bringing the project another step closer to its final height of 578 feet. Authorities have dismantled the last of 988 households in the town of Gaoyang, in central China's Hubei province, and cleared related garbage, ending a process that began four years ago, state-run media reported Wednesday. The residents of Gaoyang join some 1.4 million others who have been evacuated to make way for the world's largest hydroelectric project. With the dam structure already completed, authorities have...

The month-long algae outbreak on a tributary of the Yangtze River, blamed on large numbers of phosphor mines and processing factories, has sent an alert to environmental authorities to raise water treatment standards in the Three Gorges Dam area. Large areas of algae bloomed on June 16 on a 25 km section of the Xiangxi in Xingshan county, Hubei province, forcing thousands of residents to stop drawing water from it, the Xinhua News Agency reported Monday. Cai Qinghua from the Institute of Hydrobiology under the Chinese Academy of Science, said: "This is the first time the Three Gorges Dam area...

The lack of confidence that some of my Chinese friends seem to have in their government comes as a surprise for me. After all, it would seem that by now, Beijing should be an expert at providing assistance for displaced people. We are talking about a government that recently has completed the Three Gorges Project, the world’s largest dam, and in the process has had to relocate up to 4 million people. Many of these people, by no choice of their own, were sent to brand new cities that the Chinese government quickly constructed as the dam’s resevoir began to...

<p>A landslide near China's massive Three Gorges Dam has trapped nearly 200 people and is threatening to overrun much of a village, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported Sunday.</p> <p>Emergency workers were trying to rescue the villagers after heavy rains triggered a landslide of 60,000 cubic meters of mud, which swept into a schoolyard and 37 homes in Xiaohe Village of Gaoyang Township in Hubei Province, according to Xinhua.</p>

(BEIJING) -- Water quality in China's Three Gorges reservoir hasn't improved despite an ambitious, multibillion-dollar effort to clean up the lake created by construction of the world's largest dam, according to China's top environmental-regulatory agency. The report reveals the continuing difficulties China's leaders face in managing the Three Gorges Dam, which was supposed to be a flagship national project but instead has generated an array of unforeseen consequences, from water pollution to landslides along the shores of its massive reservoir. According to the study by the State Environmental Protection Administration, $2.5 billion has already been spent on cleanup projects such...

China has done its best to ruin the scenery on the Yangtze River. Smog blots out the sun. Factories dot the shores. And the construction of a giant dam has flooded the Three Gorges, the famed river passage through towering limestone and sandstone cliffs. And yet, one afternoon last spring, a friend and I were staring in quiet wonder from a cruise ship sailing up the Yangtze. We were in a world of green, gliding past cliffs covered in rain-slicked trees and bamboo bushes. Slender waterfalls churned into the jade-colored river. "It is really beautiful. I can only imagine what...

In a new sign of China's water and environmental crisis, cargo boats on the Yangtze have been stranded on river banks as its levels have fallen to a 140-year low. Forty boats have run aground since October on the lower stretches of China's longest river, which is both a water supply and industrial thoroughfare for a region of 400 million people. Government scientists blamed an extended drought in southern and south-western China, which caused widespread water shortages last autumn. But they also admitted that too much water had been held up by the giant Three Gorges Dam, which was built...

(BEIJING) -- Chinese authorities have blamed lax supervision over construction and engineering for a landslide near the massive Three Gorges Dam last month that killed 35, state media reported on Wednesday. Faulty procedures blasting rock at the railway tunnel construction site were the direct cause of the disaster, Xinhua news agency reported, citing a statement released jointly by the Ministry of Railways and the State Administration of Work Safety. "Although the causes of the accident were complicated, the accident revealed management negligence and loose control over engineering and construction ... " the statement said. Most of the victims were travelling...

(HUANGTUPO VILLAGE, China) — Wang Zhushu rarely sleeps at night. Instead, the 61-year-old retiree paces, listening to the drone of passing ships that shake the walls of her house on the banks of the Yangtze River. Wang's one-story, brick-and-concrete home rests, she says, on increasingly unsteady earth, weakened and waterlogged as rising waters turn the Yangtze into an ever-broadening reservoir behind China's mammoth Three Gorges Dam. "The house has become crooked. Water seeps through the floor and there are cracks growing here, here and here," said Wang, pointing to the ceiling, a storeroom and a rock wall with crevices three...

(BEIJING) - Officials running China's huge Three Gorges Dam have vowed to clear the last of the "1,000-year old" trash mountains fouling the reservoir, state media reported on Thursday. The 300,000-tonne slope of garbage teetering on the shores of the Yangtze River dates back to the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and has been rising rapidly in recent years, an official at Luoqi Town in southwest China told the Xinhua news agency. "The large amount of domestic refuse exposed on the bank emits a foul odor and threatens the water quality of the Yangtze," the report said. Environmental problems are common around...

(THREE GORGES DAM, Hubei Province, China) – It was correspondent Mark Mullen who first noticed them. "What's that?" he asked as he pointed down at two red, waxy-looking discs on the ground. A piece of paper with Chinese writing was pinned on one of them. "They're all over the place," he said. "Dunno," I replied, befuddled by the writing. But once we became aware of them, we noticed they were everywhere. And because of where we were standing, atop the Three Gorges Dam, their existence seemed especially baffling...... ......I approached the engineer from the Three Gorges Project Development Corporation who was...

Another four mega dams are expected to appear on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River and together they will have the capacity to produce double the amount of hydropower created by the Three Gorges facility, a senior engineer of the projects' construction body confirmed today. The dams are expected to create a new world record with a total installed hydropower capacity of 32 million kilowatts, surpassing the 18.2-million-kilowatt Three Gorges Dam. The dams will lie along the lower reaches of the Jinshajiang River, the biggest tributary to the Yangtze between Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. Plans of Wudongde Hydropower Station...

(GAOYANG, China)--Life was never easy for peasant farmer Fu Xiuqiong, but since China's Three Gorges Reservoir began to fill in 2003, she has barely kept her head above water. In a story common for this small town in the Chongqing region, her family watched helplessly last year as local officials bulldozed their home to make way for the rising waters, only to deny them promised resettlement funds. She and husband Jiang Yongchang now subsist off a shrinking vegetable plot, living in a makeshift hut they built on the shore with nowhere to go as the waters inch higher. "It's very...

(BEIJING) - China has raised the flow of water from behind its massive Three Gorges Dam to ease a downstream drought that is the worst in half a century, the official Xinhua agency reported on Thursday. Low rainfall along the upper parts of the Yangtze River, China's longest, meant levels on the middle stretches had retreated 1.5 meters below average, stranding at least 26 cargo ships over the past month. River authorities issued a warning to shipping about low water levels, and ships had to be checked for weight and unload excess cargo before heading through the drought-stricken section, the...

Officials behind the massive Three Gorges Dam are preparing to plug any holes in the project even as waters in its reservoir peak in two years. Since the 2,309-m-long dam was erected in 2003, the water level in the reservoir has risen in stages, reaching 156 m last year. While the level is scheduled to reach a maximum height of 175 m above sea level in 2009, there have been fears that rising waters from the world's largest hydropower project will further strain shores and trigger landslides. "The government is closely monitoring and intensifying repair work, and I think we...

(BEIJING) — Workers clearing rocks from a landslide in central China discovered a bus underneath the rubble Friday, three days after the accident, and authorities said the 27 people believed to be on board were unlikely to be found alive. The landslide tore a 165-foot gash in a mountainside Tuesday and heightened concern that the massive reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam, 120 miles away, was wreaking ecological havoc in the region. Work crews clearing the rubble found the wreckage of the bus Friday morning, a local official and the government's Xinhua News Agency reported. The bus was traveling from...

Deadly landslide raises more concerns about China's Three Gorges Dam Aileen McCabe , CanWest Asia Correspondent Published: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 SHANGHAI - A deadly landslide near China's controversial Three Gorges Dam has killed one construction worker and left two missing in central Hubei Province, near the dam's massive reservoir. The official news agency Xinhua said the tragedy occurred on Tuesday, the same day Chinese government officials pledged to step up measures to deal with environmental problems caused by the dam. Xinhua did not say what caused the fatal landslide, but in a story about the new environmental plan, Xinhua...

(BEIJING) -- China has announced plans to confront environmental and geological problems around the Three Gorges Dam, even as a landslide in the region Tuesday killed one construction worker, injured a second and trapped two others beneath a mound of fallen earth. That incident came as Chinese officials face growing questions about a project dogged for years by controversy and discord. Water pollution, soil erosion and landslides are becoming increasingly frequent as water continues to rise and inundate more land in the reservoir behind the mammoth dam. On Tuesday night, state media announced a host of new environmental measures from...

(BEIJING) - A landslide near China's huge Three Gorges Dam trapped four workers, killing one, state media reported, as officials announced efforts to counter environmental fallout from the controversial project. The landslide hit on Tuesday morning in the central province of Hubei, beside a half-completed railway line near the 660-km (410-mile) dam reservoir, Xinhua news agency reported. The workers were perched on scaffolding next to a tunnel in Badong County when buried by collapsing earth, the report said. One was killed, another injured and two remained missing. The slide also severed a nearby highway and appeared to be the latest...

(BEIJING) -- The environmental impact of China's Three Gorges dam has been less damaging than feared, a high-ranking Chinese official said on Thursday. Speaking exclusively to Xinhua, Wang Xiaofeng, director of the office of the Three Gorges Project Committee of the State Council, said that "the (environmental) problems (of the dam), including landslides, trapped silt and algae blooms, did not go beyond the scope predicted by the feasibility report in 1991, and in some aspects, they are even less severe than predicted." "We are able to allow more silt than the designed volume to get through the dam, and no...

(BADONG, China) - In a precarious apartment overlooking the Yangtze River, Xu Faxiu and her husband are among the hold-outs in China's wrenching campaign to move 1.4 million residents for the vast Three Gorges Dam. To make way for rising waters, the government has already resettled whole towns and villages to higher slopes or distant cities and provinces -- an exodus that has brought protests of official corruption and inadequate compensation from displaced people, many of them poor farmers. Before the waters peak at 175 meters next year, Xu, 51, and her sick husband Chen Kaishen must abandon "old Badong",...

(BADONG, China) - The slopes of Chenjialing Village have shuddered and groaned lately, cracking and warping homes and fields, and making residents fear the banks of China's swelling Three Gorges Dam may hold deadly perils. The vast hydro scheme is meant to subdue the Yangtze River, but as the water levels rise, parts of its shores have strained and cracked, dismaying scientists and officials and alarming villages such as Chenjialing in Badong County. Xiang Chuncai, who has lived much of her 84 years on this hillside of orange groves above the Yangtze, recalled waking in fright last year to rattling...

(BEIJING) - More than 300 cargo ships have been held up on a stretch of river in southern China because of thick silt and low water levels, Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday, citing local navigation authorities. The ships, carrying coal, carbon, cement and grains, have been held up since early November in the Xijiang River, a tributary of the Pearl River, en route to the southern province of Guangdong, the report said. "Thick sediment has made the river route shallow and delayed many large ships," the report said. Heavy industrialization and the impact of damming has caused increased sediment...

(BEIJING) — A Chinese man is suing the government over the deaths of thousands of rare plants he had saved from being submerged behind the Three Gorges dam, state media said Thursday. Xiang Xiufa, from Chongqing in China's southwest, moved about 24,000 plants from near the dam to a new botanical garden, the China Daily reported. Businessman Xiang had hoped to ensure the survival of the plants, some of which were the only remaining samples of species millions of years old, the newspaper said. But a government subsidy of 2.09 million yuan (280,000 US dollars) that was to have been...

The planned Xiluodu Hydropower Plant will alleviate pressure on the Three Gorges Dam in harnessing the Yangtze River, said a senior project director. Damming of the Jinsha River, the biggest tributary to the Yangtze, was completed yesterday afternoon after 30 hours of work at Xiluodu in Sichuan Province, marking a key step in preparation for the plant, which is expected to open in 2015. At that spot, the river is 47 meters wide and runs at a speed of seven meters per second. "The Xiluodu project will help improve the flood-control capacity along the Yangtze River," said Fan Qixiang, vice...

Sceptics about the world's biggest hydroelectric dam are being vindicated (MIAOHE) -- Peasants in the village of Miaohe on the north bank of the Yangzi River say nothing like it had occurred in their lifetimes, nor those of their parents and grandparents. One afternoon in April, for a few grim seconds, the ground shook beneath them. The Wild Cat landslide, long at rest beneath the terraced maize fields, orange-tree groves and earth-brick houses perched on the steep slope, was stirring. Experts had long worried about the Wild Cat, 17km (10 miles) upstream from the Three Gorges dam in a narrow...

(BEIJING) -- China's government said it will move an additional four million people away from the Three Gorges Dam over the next 10 to 15 years because of environmental damage -- nearly three times the number initially displaced by the building of the world's biggest hydroelectric dam. The announcement by China's official Xinhua news agency is further proof of unforeseen consequences from what was supposed to be China's crowning engineering achievement. The Three Gorges Dam was built to showcase China's ability to tame the devastating floods of the Yangtze River and provide clean electricity. Instead, it is coming to represent...

China has done its best to ruin the scenery on the Yangtze River. Smog blots the sun. Factories dot the shores. And the construction of a giant dam has flooded the Three Gorges, the famed river passage through towering limestone and sandstone cliffs. And yet, one afternoon this past spring, a friend and I were staring in quiet wonder from a cruise ship sailing up the Yangtze. We were in a world of green, gliding past cliffs covered in rain-slicked trees and bamboo bushes. Slender waterfalls churned into the jade-colored river. "It is really beautiful. I can only imagine what...

THREE GORGES CONSTRUCTION SITE, Hubei Province, June 11 (Xinhua) -- Electricity generation now spans the two banks of China's largest hydropower project, the Three Gorges Project, with the first turbine generator on the right bank of the river going into operation on Monday after a 72-hour trial. The 700,000-kilowatt No. 22 turbine began producing electricity at 9:12 a.m. The electricity is transmitted through the state power grid to energy-strained eastern cities such as Shanghai. An electronic monitoring screen showed the turbine was operating normally with output of 650,000 kwh. The 14 turbines on the left bank of the Gorges...

Three Gorges dam causes downstream erosion--study 21 May 2007 08:48:29 GMT Source: Reuters HONG KONG, May 21 (Reuters) - China's Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydropower project, is retaining huge amounts of sediment and nutrients and causing significant erosion in the downstream reaches of the Yangtze River, researchers have found. In a paper published in the latest volume of the Geophysical Research Letters, Chinese scientists said the dam had retained 151 million tonnes of sediment each year since 2003. The researchers from the East China Normal University in Shanghai calculated supplies of water and sediment at places along the...

China completed construction of the world's largest dam Saturday in Three Gorges area, central China's Hubei Province, signifying accomplishment of the major structure of the mammoth Three Gorges water control project aiming to tame the flood-prone Yangtze River, the nation's longest. At 2:00 on Saturday afternoon, the final concrete was poured for the 2,309-meter-long, 185-meter-high main wall of the Three Gorges Dam, which by then began to have capacity of holding water. The concrete placement of the Dam's main section was completed 10 months ahead of the schedule, which will enable the Dam to start its role in power...

China told to use nukes if Taiwan hits dam Some parliamentary delegates call on Beijing to retract its no-first-use pledge to deter 'terrorist acts' like dam strike By Guo Shiping SHENZHEN - China should withdraw its undertaking on no first-use of nuclear weapons should Taiwan try to blow up the Three Gorges Dam, according to some parliamentary delegates. The call was made by them - as well as some who sit on the country's top political advisory body - in the wake of a recent US Defence Department report which suggested that Taiwan could target the dam in a pre-emptive...

Some parliamentary delegates call on Beijing to retract its no-first-use pledge to deter 'terrorist acts' like dam strike SHENZHEN - China should withdraw its undertaking on no first-use of nuclear weapons should Taiwan try to blow up the Three Gorges Dam, according to some parliamentary delegates. The call was made by them - as well as some who sit on the country's top political advisory body - in the wake of a recent US Defence Department report which suggested that Taiwan could target the dam in a pre-emptive strike. Advertisement That study sparked off a public debate in Taiwan on...

Cracks in Three Gorges Dam to Be Fixed   LatelineNews: 2003-6-12] BEIJING - In a rare admission of problems at the giant Three Gorges Dam in central China, officials said Thursday that cracks found in the dam could leak if not fixed. The comments contrasted with government claims that the dam on the Yangtze river has been a success since its reservoir began to fill on June 1. The government says the water on Tuesday reached the depth necessary to allow ships to sail on the reservoir. Inspectors have found about 80 cracks in the dam's surface, said Pan Jiazhong,...

China says that 80 cracks have appeared in the Three Gorges dam, only days after the huge reservoir behind it was filled for the first time. "If water enters these cracks, there could be negative effects, so we are fixing them very carefully," Pan Jiazhong, head of the dam's inspection group, said yesterday. He denied that the cracks threatened the dam's safety, but said they could expand and cause leaking unless repaired. The reservoir now extends upstream for 219km (350 miles), with a maximum water depth of 135 metres (440ft). A failure of the dam could have catastrophic consequences downstream...

BEIJING — In a rare admission of problems at the giant Three Gorges Dam in central China, officials said yesterday that cracks found in the dam could leak if not fixed. The comments contrasted with government claims that the dam on the Yangtze River has been a success since its reservoir began to fill June 1. The government said the water on Tuesday reached the depth necessary to allow ships to sail on the reservoir. Inspectors have found about 80 cracks in the dam's surface, said Pan Jiazhong, head of the construction committee inspection group. He said that while they...

QUTANG, China -- Even with months of warning, the rising waters of the Yangtze River behind the Three Gorges Dam took thousands of people by surprise. As the steadily rising reservoir lapped at their fields, villagers rushed today to uproot corn, sweet potatoes and vegetables they planted just weeks ago. Engineers had posted signs showing where the water level will be when the reservoir, which started to fill on June 1, reaches its highest point. But in a sign of the confusion surrounding the world's biggest hydroelectric project, and by sheer force of rural tradition, many planted in fields they...

ENGJIE, China, June 7 — There's an odd calm along this part of the Yangtze, no jubilation and no weeping, as the tawny waters lap several feet higher each day and a 350-mile stretch of this mightiest of rivers is finally transformed into a long narrow lake. After decades of bitter debate, years of heavy construction and the uprooting so far of 700,000 people, the Three Gorges Dam has closed its gates. On June 15, the reservoir will be filled to its interim level of 135 meters, or 443 feet above sea level. The next day, the first commercial ships...

<p>BEIJING, China (AP) -- China began filling the reservoir behind its gargantuan Three Gorges Dam on Sunday in a major step toward completion of the world's largest hydroelectric project.</p> <p>The sluice gate of the dam began closing at midnight and by early morning live broadcasts on state television showed the water level had already reached 106 meters (350 feet). By June 15, the level is expected to reach 135 meters (446 feet).</p>

Three Gorges corruption told -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Since its launching in 1993, 234 cases of corruption and embezzlement involving the Three Gorges Dam Project have been settled. The cases involved 267 perpetrators and 42 million yuan (US$5.05 million), or 0.13 percent of the total funds appropriated for the world's largest water control program in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. Most of the embezzled money has been recovered, said Guo Shuyan, director of the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee. He made the announcement at a press conference yesterday held by the committee, the Ministry of Land and Resources and the State...

Amid growing tensions with Taiwan, China has revealed that it has built a missile defence shield to protect the Three Gorges dam from the threat of military attack. China Radio International broadcast the news in apparent response to a recent report in the Taibei-based China Times Weekly that said Taiwan has conducted a computer-simulated military exercise in which state-of-the-art F-16 fighter jets launch an attack on the dam. The F-16 is currently the only fighter plane in Taiwan’s arsenal that could undertake this long-range attack, carrying either a “smart bomb” or air-to-surface “maverick missile,” reporter Lu Zhaolong wrote in the...