Construction workers celebrate yesterday afternoon after they finished 30 hours of work to dam the Jinsha River. It's the first step in building a hydropower plant in the Xiluodu Valley along the border of the provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan.
Posted on 11/08/2007 6:23:07 PM PST by JACKRUSSELL
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 president of China Three Gorges Project Corp, which is also the builder of the Xiluodu project.
Fan said yesterday that last year's completion of the Three Gorges Dam in Yichang, Hubei Province, has provided 22.15 billion cubic meters in maximum flood holding capacity to safeguard the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze.
However, the 1,030-kilometer upper portion of the river, the Chuanjiang section, is still vulnerable to floods. The main embankments of the section can only withstand floods that could occur once in five to 20 years, below the requirement of dike strengths that can contain floods that may occur once every 50 to 100 years, said Fan.
Xiluodu, located upstream of Chuanjiang, has a designed reservoir capacity of 12.67 billion cubic meters, of which 4.65 billion cubic meters are for flood control. The reservoir can dam one-third of floods to the Three Gorges in Yichang, which is 770 kilometers from Xiluodu.
According to research from the Yangtze Water Resources Commission, a simultaneous flood-control work by both dams could instantly prevent four billion cubic meters of flood surge from inundating the densely populated plains in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze, where China's economic centers such as Shanghai, Nanjing, and Wuhan are located.
The CTGPC said the Three Gorges project contained 6.8 billion cubic meters of floodwater this summer, when the world's largest dam was first used to control a flood crest. The Three Gorges dam was completed on May 20, 2006.
Because of its role, the water level downstream at Shashi, Hubei Province, fell from a peak of 42.97 meters to 42.69 meters within hours, avoiding the danger level of 43 meters.
However, the river's maximum recorded flood crest still pushed water levels in Zhenjiang and Nanjing above warning lines.
Construction workers celebrate yesterday afternoon after they finished 30 hours of work to dam the Jinsha River. It's the first step in building a hydropower plant in the Xiluodu Valley along the border of the provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan.
Good memory. Here’s the thread about the cracks:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/929183/posts
I also googled it.
I'm not quite so calm about the prospects of the 'repairs' done to the structure of the dam in resolving the problem.
*I* think its a disaster waiting to happen. These river floods have been terrifying the Chinese for thousands of years.
Got a bad feeling about this.
I think you are right in line with your prediction.
It's one thing to have a structure sound when it's been created. It's another entirely to have it unsound an different pressure points shift when cracks appear, then talk glibly about repairing the cracks.
LOL. Especially with all the google listings about the graft and corruption that was involved with building the dam in the first place. Substandard materials + substandard work = disaster.
The Chernobyl death count was somewhere between 30 and 60,000. The collapse of this dam will result in many more deaths within a much shorter timespan.
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