The Chinese should consult the Dutch who invented dams.
The Chinese should consult the Dutch who invented dams.
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I’ve been to the Three Gorges dam and was actually one of the first to take a boat from Yichang to Chongqing via the locks at the dam....I think this was just a couple of weeks after the lock became operational.
Consult the Dutch? At the top of the dam there is a large center with a model of the dam and the surrounding area. The fellow doing the talk when I was there took questions and was actually quite forthcoming when I asked plenty of pointed questions about who did the engineering and who supplied the equipment. As I told the fellow with me afterwards, it’s as if he was saying “we’ve got such a horrid history in China of building dams that we went totally outside for this.”
The history that preceded the dam is quite interesting... In 1919, Sun Yat-sen wrote a book about China’s development and said that a dam across the river would generate 30,000,000 hp.... what is actually installed are 32 turbines that generate 700 MW each. In other words, exactly what Sun Yat-sen said the dam would do. In 1944, John Savage who worked for the United States Bureau of Reclamation drew up some of the original design plans for it.....
So who actually engineered it? There were of course many parties involved but to summarize, it was mainly Canadian engineering companies who did the feasibility, detailed design and project management i.e. Acres International, AGRA Monenco, SNC-Lavelin and so on... a lot of consortiums. From the United States, Bechtel did some consulting but if I recall correctly, Harza Engineering out of Chicago supervised the construction...
As for all the power generation and other equipment, I don’t think any of it was supplied by China... mainly it came from Germany, France, Canada, United States, Brazil...
There were way too many companies from many countries who worked on it that can be mentioned here... but I think the only thing that the Chinese supplied was the place to put the dam and likely the manual labor....