It’s Probably Nothing

Claws of the Panda It's Probably Nothing 47 Comments

China’s Three Gorges Dam At The Brink

Cheng says that the flood has already raised the water dammed behind the Three Gorges to 50 — fifty — feet higher than the maximum flood level. Rain is still falling this week in central China. I am told by a Chinese media follower that the government has just raised the emergency level in five affected provinces — Shanxi, Henan, Shandong, Anhui and Jiangsu — to the highest level below martial law, as part of last-ditch efforts to protect the Three Gorges Dam. The state is releasing water from tributary dams, flooding those provinces even worse than they already have been, because the alternative — a Three Gorges Dam collapse — is unthinkable. The WSJ’s Cheng said that China has had its worst economic year in four decades because of Covid, but if that dam goes, the damage to China’s economy will “dwarf” what Covid has done to it.

This simulation video has been making the roundsMore from The Risks of Three Gorges Dam’s Flooding

47 Replies to “It’s Probably Nothing”

  1. May God have mercy on their souls.

    Though the CCP has done their best to stop those who would follow Him.

    1. God’s love for His people endures forever.

      His patience with their tormentors does not.

      God does this sort of thing sometimes, to humble those who refuse to accept that He is Lord.

      When He releases the water dragon to feast on the flesh and blood of the vermin-eating bastards who think they’re the master race, give thanks to the God of Israel, for He and He alone is good.

  2. Feel very sorry for those living downstream and at risk. They are not of the elite, but they will suffer the consequences of the elites’ bad decisions.

    1. Sadly so will we. Wuhan is a significant source of pharmaceuticals (and fentanyl but that’s another sad conversation).

  3. If it collapses it may stop a war between Chinah and the US of A.
    Then again it may guarantee one.

    1. The first casualty of war is truth. But good luck getting truth out of a communist nation at any time.

    1. So you are wishing for the death of millions of innocents enslaved by a ruthless communist dictatorship? You really are scum.

  8. Kate, It isn’t as dire as the media swine is making it sound like.

    You heard of COVID-19 Fear Porn, this is 3 Gorges Dam Fear Porn. China has had a horrific monsoon season so far. There is flooding up and down the Yangtze River Valley from local rains, and from all the rain flowing down the tributaries of the Yangtze River.

    The Normal Pool level for the Three Gorges Dam at the beginning of flood season is 145 meters. They like to keep it at 145 meters, so they all the volume from 145 meters to 175 meters to store upstream flood waters. At the end of the rainy season, they raise the pool level to the Maximum Normal Pool level at 175 meters. Look at the spreadsheets for October to December 2019. They flood up to 173-175 meters and maintain that water level, later in the beginning of the year, January to June, they draw it down through the turbines to generate electricity, and to make room for the next monsoon season.

    The top of the dam is 185 meters.
    I don’t know where or at what height it will overflow if it goes above 175 meters. If it overfows through rock and dirt, the entire river could bypass the dam, as it floods the entire downstream valley all the way to the sea. If, for some reason it doesn’t overflow elsewhere, at 185 meters it will flow over the top of the dam onto what is at the base, the discharge gates in the center, and the turbine halls on either side.

    With all the rain they are getting, it is a terrible balancing act. They are trying to keep the downstream flooding to a minimum by filling up the pool behind the 3 Gorges Dam, but they cannot risk overflowing and destroying the dam. As long as the monsoon rains keep coming, they are going to have flooding above and below the dam.

    Three Gorges Dam pool level is currently about 159 meters, down from a 164 meter height earlier in the week on July 20. They are discharging a lot of water to keep the pool level low, so the future monsoon rain floods can be stored. It is not presently near the maximum 175 meter pool level, but it closer to it than the desired 145 meter level.

    Yangtze River levels downstream at Yichang (see the flood simulation video for cities and relative locations) are also higher due to the discharges.

    From here:

    https://journal.probeinternational.org/reservoir-level-3/

    1. Thanks rd!! And hats off!! Free speech is OK. True speak is much better.

    2. Here is a good YouTube video that explains a lot of this,

      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g3foF-WOKmI

      If they have a major earthquake, or if parts/sections of the dam do start slipping dowstream because of its poor anchorage into the bedrock of the foundation, then it can and will be ugly. If it doesn’t fail immediately, they will be emptying it as fast as possible, to relieve the stress, and to minimize the catastrophic flood height. In the mean time, dumping all those tens or hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of water will be a smaller, but still very dangerous flood by itself.

      Right now the RECORD BREAKING MONSOON RAINS are causing a lot of flooding all over China, not just at the 3 Gorges Dam.

      China has a lot (80,000?) of small earthen dams throughout China, many built in the Mao Tse Tung Era by Communist Political Officer led Engineering and Craftsmanship. Expect not to hear about those dams failing, even though at least one in a southern province by Hainan and Vietnam has already completely failed.

      Also if floods get bad, they will breach levees into farm fields and uninhabited areas to lower river levels too. Many of the media call the levees dams through ignorance or mistranslation

      1. As you’ve alluded here, the type of failure of the dam if it does fail won’t be what is included in the top linked video (which showed the whole face collapsing at once and a wall of water racing down the valley).

        In the event of the failure of a section or two will mean that water would start racing out, but depending on the size of the gap it could take hours to weeks. It will mean flooding as the water level raised downriver, but it is very unlikely be the tsunami type of disaster that is portrayed.

    3. Keep peddling your CCP propaganda poison Wumao RD – Long Live Free Tibet an Independent Taiwan a Free Hong Kong and the Federal State of China under the leadership of Miles Guo!

    1. Here’s your 50¢ Wumao Plainz Drifter – Global Times is pure CCP propaganda.

  10. Did the same all female team on engineers design and build Three Gorges, as that bridge in Florida or wherever that fell down?

    1. It was a pedestrian only(!) bridge at Florida International University. It was way over-designed in terms of weight and under-designed in terms of support for that weight. The female team from the female headed company had the hubris of final installation and test without diverting the traffic below, resulting in deaths as the bridge collapsed. I have not heard of any criminal action against that team. It should be at least manslaughter.

      1. Women and POC’s don’t get punished for things like manslaughter. Any errors they made must have been due to sexism or racism from white males.

  11. China needs to watch Karma closely, it has a habit of biting the deserving on the inbound cycle.

    Actually thank god for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming which means China has serious drought conditions…… helps the dam levels no end.

  12. related a 3 Gorges Dam update

    雙語 Three Gorges Dam Very Dangerous. Why Yangtze River Suffered Severe Flooding Recent Years ?
    see Youtube for the history of the 3 Gorges Dam idea

    They are now closing in on 100 year flood levels, and blew up a smaller dam over the weekend to relieve pressure on 3 Gorges.

    China may suffer worst flood in 100 years on Yangtse, affecting 500 million due to 3-gorges dam

    Yeah good luck with that; and real soon you’re going to see ATHEISTS PRAYING that their signature COMMUNIST project doesn’t fail!!!

    Tragically stupid and my father told them so….

    Cheers

    Hans Rupprecht – Commander-in-Chief
    Army Group “True North”
    1st Saint Nicolaas Army

    1. Question:

      How would blowing up another dam relieve pressure on the Three Gorges Dam?

      If it is upstream, all it does is add its impounded water and debris to the pool above the Three Gorges Dam, making it worse. If it below it, all it would do is drain the downstream side a little quicker, but the downstream doesn’t appear to have any serious flooding issues. If it is in a different watershed, how does it affect the dam at all?

      1. It feeds another river/canal draining from the reservoir, in another direction. If I understand things correctly those are rather small (relatively) in volume.

  13. More Fear Porn.

    “just raised the emergency level in five affected provinces — Shanxi, Henan, Shandong, Anhui and Jiangsu — to the highest level below martial law, as part of last-ditch efforts to protect the Three Gorges Dam.”

    Shanxi is on the Yellow River.
    Henan is also on the Yellow River.
    Shandong is on the Yellow River.
    Anhui does have the Yangtze flowing through it, but the province is far downstream of the Three Gorges Dam. It is next to Jiangsu
    Jiangsu is on the Yellow Sea, and the Yangtze River passes through it to the sea.

    None of these provinces affect the Three Gorges Dam. They have as much to do with the 3 Gorges Dam as my rain barrel. But they are being hammered by the same monsoon rains as the 3 Gorges Dam. The same rains are flooding Nepal and Bangladesh too.

  14. @rd

    via LA Times:

    BEIJING — Authorities in central China blew up a dam Sunday to release the surging waters behind it amid widespread flooding across the country that has claimed scores of lives.
    State broadcaster CCTV reported that the dam on the Chuhe River in Anhui province was destroyed with explosives early Sunday morning, after which the water level was expected to drop by more than 2 feet.

    Water levels on many rivers, including the mighty Yangtze, have been unusually high this year because of torrential rains.

    Blasting dams and embankments to discharge water was an extreme response employed during China’s worst floods in recent years in 1998, when more than 2,000 people died and almost 3 million homes were destroyed.

    Last week, the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze opened three floodgates as the water level behind the massive dam rose more than 50 feet above flood level. Another flood crest is expected to arrive at the dam Tuesday.

    Elsewhere, soldiers and workers have been testing the strength of embankments and shoring them up with sandbags and rocks. On Saturday, firefighters and others finished filling in a 620-foot break on Poyang Lake, China’s largest freshwater lake, that had caused widespread flooding across 15 villages and agricultural fields in Jiangxi province. More than 14,000 people were evacuated.

    Seasonal flooding strikes large parts of China annually, especially in its central and southern regions, but has been especially severe this summer. More than 150 people have died or are missing in flooding and landslides brought on by the torrential rains — 23 of them since Thursday alone.

    About 1.8 million people have been evacuated, and direct losses attributed to flooding are estimated at more than 49 billion yuan ($7 billion), according to the Ministry of Emergency Management.

    Major cities have been spared so far, but concern has risen over Wuhan and other downstream metropolises that are home to tens of millions of people.
    ……

    The Yangtze river has vast flood plains, which over the last number of decades have been turned into farmland.
    So not only does the water have no where to go as the DaZe region has been turned to agriculture. Thus blowing up tributary dams and releasing water into flood plains also cuts into their future food supplies.

    check youtube with this title:

    “雙語 Three Gorges Dam Very Dangerous. Why Yangtze River Suffered Severe Flooding Recent Years ?”

    Cheers

    Hans Rupprecht – Commander-in-Chief
    Army Group “True North”
    1st Saint Nicolaas Army

    1. Hans,
      Thanks. The current Media Narrative is all THREE!! GORGES!! DAM!! All The Time!!!

      None of these reporters can even be troubled to look at basic Geography. They hear a rumor, report it, and try to connect it all the the one big story they know about, the Three Gorges Dam. Even if it is a story about a province next to Mongolia.

      Anhui province is far downstream of the 3G Dam, it is well below Wuhan on the Yangtze. It is the province next to the province on the Yellow Sea.

      No matter what you do there, it doesn’t affect the 3G Dam, but it will possibly save a city in Anhui Province behind the dam from worse flooding. I bet this dam is/was one of those many small earthen dams built by the orders of Mao Tse Tung, poorly engineered, poorly maintained, and then the population expanded around it in the last 50, 60, 70 years.

      The Entire Chinese River and Irrigation System is getting a hell of a stress test this year. So are Nepal, Assam, and Bangladesh. Supposedly half of Bangladesh is under water right now.

      1. It has been noted by some commentators that the industrial/manufacturing heartland is mostly down stream of the 3 Gorges; principally Wuhan city to well over 11 million people. Chongqing further up river is home to 30 million. Either way the “authorities” are going to make a choice over which city gets ‘saved’…

        Wuhan is building levees and sandbagging, but the flood waters are upwards of 5 meters.
        What is in Wuhan? A: The PLA secret base and the Dongfeng missile vehicle factory; not to mention a gaggle of manufacturing facilities.

        Similarly, Shanghai is under water and also engaged in dike building; but their fields won’t be draining until some time well into the end of September.

        In short, they are flooding the farmlands, formerly flood plains in the hope of saving the cities.

        This is all regardless of whether 3 Gorges Dam holds; as monsoon season lasts until the end of September.

        So dam breach or no; the folks in the industrial heartland of China will not be having a swell time!

        Cheers

        Hans Rupprecht – Commander-in-Chief
        Army Group “True North”
        1st Saint Nicolaas Army

  15. If it fails it would be a major loss of face for the communist regime.
    Three gourges is their engineering crown, which they tout as “look at what communism achieved”, its failure would be an existential crisis.
    For comparison the Hoover dam is considered an engineering achievement and a symbol of American capability to build a structure that has lasted almost one hundred years. Three gourges is not even two decades old and is showing signs of failure, a reflection that says they can build it but it won’t last.
    Such a failure would be a psychological shock for the politburo like abandoning Vietnam was for America.
    The dam like communism will fail, it’s not if, but when.

    1. The Hoover Dam was built to control the flooding of the Colorado River. It paid for itself by generating electricity. One reason it was successful was because it was built by commercial firms:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Companies,_Inc

      Also, because it was built during the Depression, there was a large pool of labour to draw on.

  18. Having had a tour via riverboat of the 3 Gorges and upstream I can say it is just a massive, massive site. Concrete covers the banks for kms. The reservoir lake behind the dam is 600 kms long so imagine the size of the flood if the dam breaks.

    1. All one has to to is to look at the so-called scablands in Washington state. Those were created when the ice dam which held glacial Lake Missoula in place gave way. (Lake Missoula might have been about the same size as the Three Gorges reservoir.) The water, as well as whatever debris it took along, eroded and scoured the landscape.

      The outflow went all the way along the Columbia River basin out into the Pacific, with indications that some of the silt settled as far south as California.

  19. I hope the dam holds. As much as the communists deserve it, the Chinese people do not. Not that hoping will change anything either way.

    1. Thomas, amen to that, and if the so called kristians would read what they post, in context, they would under stand why I because an athiest!

  20. Thanks rd and others for clarity on this, and thanks to Kate for posting on this subject.

    I know very little about dams and hydrodynamics and also very little of Chinese geography, so this has all been very enlightening.

    The domestic msm coverage of anything outside of an approved bubble is terrible and int’l news seems to only have this from the same approved source.

    Yesterday our local news did 10 minutes on the suspected death of an escaped domestic turkey. Not a drop of news on the flooding and evacuations in China.

  21. I am not an engineer of any sort but it seems to me that if a dam, any dam, reaches the point of an over the top flow, that dam is going down from the sides or the center but it is going.

  22. Be a terrible human tragedy if it went, probably make the Japan tsunami look like a wave pool accident.
    Read a few comments elsewhere that claim much of the engineering expertise and construction management that built the TGD was outsourced from countries that know a bit about dam building, so I can believe it may be built to take what’s going on over there.
    As to the blasting of dams/levees, I believe they are doing much of that downstream from TGD to relieve pressure on the downstream river as they open the massive floodgates. Since the dam was built, the lower river could be constricted to a channel and once vulnerable flood plains be protected and used. In the current scenario, they need those areas to flood again. This is probably true of other dams and rivers around their country.
    The big what if comes from “unexpected consequences” upstream from the dam. There are many hills along the reservoir said to be susceptible to landslides. Many of which could produce a huge wave that could overtop the dam, possibly even dislodge it.
    A failure of any sort would be a great egg in the face to the CCP leadership and possibly a reprieve for the rest of the world. But as I started, the human tragedy would be huge, and not necessarily worth it. More so since it will reach much farther than just those who reside and die there.

  24. Why do I keep hearing “Its gonna rain,its gonna rain” as sung by the Violent Femmes?
    I trust as the dam fails,enterprising business people will have the camera drones ready,to capture that “once in a lifetime experience”.

  25. I cannot recall the name of it, but, several decades ago, did not the US lose a relatively small concrete dam because the rock doctors and engineers had underestimated the permeability of the flanking and footing rock into which the wall was anchored? (Or the political hacks told them to ignore it if they wanted to ever work again). There have been several other similar collapses around the world in the last century or so.

    Once the water finds a tiny passage through, the erosive effect of that water can be tremendous. Say you have a small dam wall holding back water to a depth of sixty feet. At the bottom of that sixty feet of wall, the water has a “static pressure ” of a bit under three atmospheres, which is not exactly high. SCUBA diving at that depth is a pretty normal activity in places with low water turbidity. (Been there, done that; the T-shirt died years ago). However, that is the pressure being applied to every surface at the foot of that dam wall. Rock that is “impermeable” at one atmosphere may be “slightly” permeable at three. Crunch the numbers on the Three Gorges wall and the hydrostatic pressure at the footings is substantially higher, especially if the wall is holding back water at the point of spillover.

    IF the water finds a way through, it will start to act like a “Gurney” / “Spitwater”, but on a massive scale. If the dam wall is already distorting from the water pressure behind it, things may get VERY “interesting” at the footings.

    References to the builders of Three Gorges concreting the ground along the sides of the impoundment indicate that somebody, somewhere may have been listening to a real field geologist, not just the boffins or political muppets in the air-conditioned offices of the project leader or the local CCP hack.. The ONLY reason to do this additional work would have been to reduce the seepage of water into the rocks and soil on the flanks of the wall; i.e., to REDUCE the high-pressure seepage of water into alluvial soil and rocks of dubious stability. Oh, and to reduce the severity of “possible” massive landslides INTO the impoundment, caused by radically and permanently ramping up the “soil moisture” along the flanking hillsides.

    Combine saturated soils with earthquakes and you get a phenomenon called “Liquefaction”. When the quake shocks travel through near or fully saturated soil, the whole mess becomes “sloppy” for a few second as the soil particles bounce around, buffered by all that water. Anything on top of such activity is in severe danger. People and buildings alike are suddenly, effectively standing on water, with the obvious consequences. The Newcastle earthquake in Australia, 28th December 1989, did exactly that. Another one from a more distant past was on the Caribbean pirate lair of Port Royal, Jamaica, 7th. June 1692. Liquefaction played a major role in the settlement’s devastation, with many people not caught in building collapses, sinking into the liquid earth. This “sinking” was almost invariably fatal. Even if only “buried” up to the rib-cage, with the ground returning to “solid”, seconds later, it was impossible to breathe properly; suffocation soon followed.

    But what would an old electro-mechanical tech know about such things?

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