Garbage Posed to Clog China's Three Gorges Dam

Another article underlying that all is not alright with China or its environment. 

The Wall Street Journal outlines that as a result of recent rainfall across mainland China, massive levels of garbage and detritus have accumulated in river systems upstream of the the Three Gorges Dam and are posed to congest the dam's miter gate.  It is estmated that more than 150 million people live near the dam and its upper stream. Residents, due to inadequate waste removal facilities, routinely dump their household garbage directly into the river. As more people transition from low-productivity agrarian subsistence, to higher level urbanization and industrial production the overall problems are likely to increase, rather than diminish.

China’s state-controlled media continues to punch holes in the image of the mighty Three Gorges Dam.

The latest poke came via China Daily, the English-language government-run newspaper. In an article Monday, the paper warns a thick layer of garbage washed into the reservoir by torrential rains could jam a key floodgate on the world’s biggest dam.

“The large amount of waste in the dam area could jam the miter gate of the Three Gorges Dam,” Chen Lei, Three Gorges engineer, told the China Daily.

China has been coping with the deadliest floods in decades, with some 1,000 killed, stressing China’s poorly built infrastructure. Bridges have collapsed and authorities are rushing to reinforce dams and reservoirs cracking under the pressure.

Authorities have spoken publicly about problems at other dams, but this year’s unprecedented frankness about the Three Gorges in state media raises other questions. One of the Three Gorges biggest selling points was its ability to tame flooding on the Yangtze River. Critics say the dam could never live up to overhyped expectations on flood control.

In the past, domestic criticism was squashed as long as the dam’s chief proponent, former Premier Li Peng, had influence.

In the arcane shadow puppetry of China politics, perhaps all this trash talking against a project so closely linked to the former premier reflects some hidden political message?

Combined with increasing agricultural demands, encroaching deserts, water toxification, airborne pollution levels (which is estimated to cause 1.3 million premature deaths a year from respiratory disease) and industrial waste problems, China's ecological future appears grim.