Last One Out

In the news again, Three Gorges Dam.

The government finally finished evacuating all the people from under the Three Gorges Dam project. The last person evauated was a lady whom the police dragged out of the water. She protested to the end but was removed.

The key concerns of the people are of course the meager compensations given for their houses. In the usual Chinese style the payments aren't much and the protesters say many have been forced to move into their relatives houses. The houses weren't even left for the water to take care of - a few hundred people reportedly came and dismantled the last houses last week.

The whole artificial lake displaced some 1.4 million people. It's a grand monument for Hu Jintao. You can critisize the dam all you want, but it's very grand to have built a 2km+ wall holding back a 660km reservoir of water during your administation.

Several smaller hydroelectric dams along the river would have been more efficient, I recall hearing 12 being the optimal amount instead of 1. And we don't know yet how much the hillsides next to the reservoir will erode and fall to the water. We also don't know how much waste the local cities will dump in to the huge lage. Oh, and we won't know how corrupted the relocation program really was, all we have is accusations.

But we can hope the dam doesn't break. It's a nasty worst-case-scenario, with possibly millions of lives on the line. Luckily China isn't the most likely target for a military or a terrorist attack targeting a dam, but it's a large target. We must also hope no large earthquake hits the area and that it was well enough built to withstand the masses of water.

At least the government doesn't see cause for worry and claim the site is safe. But as an unrelated note, they have "encouraged" anohter 4 million people to relocate from the areas nearby by 2020. Completely unrelated to the dam as they say.

I'll credit this info to Yahoo News, who got their news from AFP and Xinhua.
OP out.