Three Gorges Dam deformed but safe, say operators (China finally admits)

[Hoodat]

Three Gorges Dam deformed but safe, say operators

Frank Chen   |   July 21, 2020

In a rare revelation, Beijing has admitted that its 2.4-kilometer Three Gorges Dam spanning the Yangtze River in Hubei province “deformed slightly” after record flooding.

The official Xinhua News Agency quoted the operator of the the world’s largest hydroelectric gravity dam as saying that some nonstructural, peripheral parts of the dam had buckled.  .  .  .

The deformation occurred last Saturday when the flood from western provinces including Sichuan and Chongqing along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River peaked at a record-setting 61,000 cubic meters per second, according to China Three Gorges Corporation, a state-owned enterprise that manages the dam and the sprawling power plant underneath it.

https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/three-gorges-dam-deformed-but-safe-say-operators/


For the first time, China acknowledges what has been obvious for awhile, that their precious dam is deformed.  But they say it just happened last Saturday.

[PeteS in CA]

This map gives some perspective of the size of the Yangtze River system:





Its straight-line length is about 3/4 of the length of China, and its course is not a straight line. Along it are major cities like Chongqing, Wuhan, and Shanghai. If that dam goes .......

The city my daughter lives in (when Covid doesn't keep her in the US) is near Qinghai Lake, between two main source branches of the Huang He, Yellow River (which, literally, puts the yellow in the Yellow Sea).

[PeteS in CA]

China warns of new floods as Three Gorges Dam under pressure

https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Natural-disasters/China-warns-of-new-floods-as-Three-Gorges-Dam-under-pressure

SHANGHAI -- Chinese authorities cautioned on Sunday of water topping warning levels on the Yangtze River as a third wave of floodwater is expected at Three Gorges Dam over the next three days.

The country is already facing one of its worst floods since 1998 with water breaching record levels at key waterways and lakes.

"The inflow of the Three Gorges Dam on the upstream Yangtze River may reach 60,000 cubic meters per second on Tuesday," the Ministry of Water Resources said in a statement. "Water at the Yangtze River midstream will rise again and exceed its limit by 0.2 meters." The ministry also warned of a "huge flood" both east and west of the city of Yichang in Hubei Province where the dam is located.

If this dam goes, a huge swath of agricultural and industrial area is likely to be heavily damaged or wiped out - Changsha and Wuhan are likely to be hit, and the area around Shanghai could also suffer.

[Fishrrman]

Judge for yourself.
Doctored image or actual picture?

[Fishrrman]

https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/yangtze-deluge-tests-limits-of-three-gorges-dam/


Caption:
"The Three Gorges Dam is 185 meters high. Water surging beyond that point may cause its collapse."

[mountaineer]

Getting some attention on twitter:

Ian Miles Cheong   @stillgray
Critical thread. If the Three Gorges Dam fails, every single one of China’s plans for world dominance will come to an end. It won’t have an economy left as every major city critical to its manufacturing, military, science, technology, and trade, would drown.
12:54 PM · Jul 30, 2020

This is the thread Ian cites. I've compressed it a bit:

HUNTSMAN@man_integrated
𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐞 (𝐨𝐫 𝐃𝐚𝐦) 𝐁𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐬
1,000 km upriver from Shanghai and the mouth of the Yangtze Delta sits a marvel of modern mega-engineering:
The Three Gorges Dam. It might be about to collapse. What happens if it does?

Completed over twenty-one years (1994-2015) out of more than 28 million cubic meters of concrete and 463,000 tons of steel, the 185 meter tall Three Gorges Dam is today the largest hydroelectric dam on earth. It generates around 2% of China's total electrical power demand.

As far back as 1918, Chinese political leaders have promoted damming the Three Gorges due to the ever-present threat of catastrophic flooding up and down the Yangtze River.  In 1931, more than 300K people were killed by floods. In 1954 and 1998, 3K+ perished in each year.

In 1982, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping promised to make the Three Gorges Dam a reality. By 1992, enough political support had been assembled for the project to be approved. The groundbreaking was in Dec 1994, though it wasn't until 1997 that the first concrete was poured.

The Three Gorges Dam has become a point of pride for the CCP.  Mega-engineering projects are a signal to the world that a nation has stepped into an elite tier of economic powerhouses.  For the CCP, it is further proof that authoritarianism is more effective than capitalism.


However, the project did not come without enormous costs.  The price tag has run more than $30 billion USD.
Choking off the sedimentary flow of the river reduces the available fertile silt required by farmland downstream, and increases risk of flooding.

All things considered, the Three Gorges Dam truly is a herculean feat of engineering, political willpower, and propaganda. This despite the risks and challenges for the people of China - especially the more than 55 million people who live along the Yangtze downstream.

It's beyond my ken to assess the structural risks and likelihood of failure for the TGD. CCP officials are downplaying risk, because that's what they do.  Now to the point of this thread - extrapolating the geopolitical/supply chain impact of failure of Three Gorges Dam.

We must first understand the importance of the Yangtze River in practical terms. The watershed of the Yangtze is broadly divided into the Upper, Middle, and Lower Reaches. Each reach is an industrial powerhouse, with specific economic and military significance.

The westernmost Upper Reach is anchored by Chongqing, a massive megacity-region of more than 30 million people. As China's west-facing #BeltandRoad gateway, Chongqing plays a critical role in connecting the Yangtze to Central Asia and Europe via rail - the "New Silk Road."

The rail service - called "Chongqing-Xinjiang-Europe Railway" - stretches more than 11,000 km and traverses a number of Central Asian nations.  It is operated jointly by Chinese, Russian, and German logistics companies, and just departed its 10,000 train in March.


However, the CXE does not just serve Chongqing and Chengdu.  It connects cargo to China's massive central/eastern industrial base via the Yangtze River's container-on-ship service. This subsidized, shorter routing cuts transit time to Wuhan from Europe by 10-14 days.

This two-way multimodal service was a safety valve for the central China industrial region (centered in Wuhan) when ocean and air cargo service ground to a halt at the onset of COVID-19.  Trucks travelled to Chongqing, with cargo moving to Europe on the CXE.

While Chongqing is the westernmost cargo hub on the Yangtze, it is closely connected via the river to the Port of Shanghai some 1,400 km away.  At Chongqing, all ocean-bound exports to/from western China are consolidated, numbering more than 1,000,000 containers/yr.

Further, the ASEAN nations have become critical trade partners with Chongqing/W.China, as traffic along the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor has exploded. This China-Singapore joint venture has seen almost 2,000 container trains move since 2017.

It is clear that the CCP views connecting China's western provinces to the world through Chongqing as a major strategic initiative. And while rail is the primary mode to achieve this, it is the freight carrying capacity of the Yangtze that makes the project possible.

Eastward from Chongqing, we come to the Yangtze's Middle Reach, home to the Three Gorges Dam. 313km downriver from the dam sits Wuhan at the border of the Lower Reach. It's the most important interior city in China and a critical military, manufacturing, and tech hub.

In this article for @theammind, I explored the importance of Wuhan to China and global trade. It is the central node of the Yangtze River's logistics network. A failure of the ports here means zero ocean container traffic upriver from the delta.

The Port of Wuhan handles more than 1.5 mil containers/year, 50% more than Chongqing. Wuhan's Tianhe airport serviced more than 24 million passenger in 2018, and a little more than 220K MT of air cargo (equivalent to about 2,000 747's). It's also the PPE hub of China.

So, let's divert for a moment to what happens downriver if the Three Gorges Dam fails. A 100m-tall wall of water will rush out at more than 100 km/hr. In 30 minutes, Yichang and its 4 million residents will be engulfed.


Zero+1 hour, Jingzhou and 5.7 million people will be swept away.
Zero+5, the major industrial city of Yueyang (5.5 mil people) will sit 5m underwater.
Zero+10 hours, Wuhan (11 mil people) will face flooding of 6-8m in all major industrial and port zones.
Zero+15 hours, Jiujiang (another major PPE hub with 4.7 mil residents) will be hit with several meters of flooding. All cropland and infrastructure will be flooded and damaged.
Zero+24 hours, Shanghai's neighboring city of Nanjing will see its port crippled.

Note, the Yangtze watershed is massive, but Biblical levels of rain have been flooding western and central China for weeks. There simply is nowhere for the water to go, except outwards towards the East China Sea, and the world's largest port of Shanghai.

Circling back now to Wuhan and the impacts to supply chains... Ports along the Yangtze saw more than 19.4 million TEU (standard unit of container measure, "twenty foot equivalent unit") in cargo traffic in 2019. By comparison, Shanghai handled 42 million TEU in 2019.

In simple terms, the Yangtze River logistics and manufacturing complex comprises 46% of the volume of the largest port on earth, since all cargo flows through Shanghai. Failure of the Three Gorges Dam would annihilate the entire logistics infrastructure of central China.

The Yangtze River east of the dam bases many PLA anti-air, ballistic missile, and PLA Air Force assets. Several entities (Taiwan included) have speculated openly about the ability to strike the dam with missiles and cause massive downstream devastation.  ...

There's much more to this thread; click here .

[PeteS in CA]

It won’t have an economy left as every major city critical to its manufacturing, military, science, technology, and trade, would drown.

Vast overstatement! Hong Kong and Guangzhou are hundreds of miles from the Yangtze River. Chengdu and Chongqing are well up river from the dam. Xian, Zhenzhou, Beijing, Tianjin, Shenyang, and more ... unfamiliar names to many/most Americans, but all have significant industrial areas, and several are major ports. A massive flood would hurt China's economy enormously, but China would still have an economy.