Three Gorges Dam - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 135

Three Gorges Dam
The Yangtze is the third-longest river in the world, behind the Nile and the Amazon. Originating
from the 5,800-meter-high Mount Tanggula in the Tibet Plateau known as the roof of the world, the
Yangtze follows a roughly west-to-east route for more than 5,500 kilometers, turning quite sinuous
at times, before emptying into the East China Sea at Shanghai. The river has 3,600 tributaries and
drains almost two million square kilometers, which amounts to almost 19 percent of China's land
area. At Yichang, some thousand kilometers from its estuary, the Yangtze has an average discharge
of almost fifteen thousand cubic meters per second.
During flood season, the water level in the river can rise as much as fifteen meters, affecting
fifteen million people and threatening 1.5 million hectares of cultivated land. Historic floods have
been devastating. The flood of 1870 is still talked about along the middle reaches of the river, and
the one in 1954 inundated three million hectares of arable land and claimed thirty thousand lives.
Altogether in the twentieth century, as many as a half-million people may have died in the Yangtze's
floodwaters.
The Yangtze also has some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, especially in the region
known as the Three Gorges, with spectacular cliffs and steeply sloping mountains rising as high as
1,500 meters. Interspersed with gently rolling hills and long, sloping river-banks, the gorges have
been compared in majesty to the Grand Canyon. Cruising the river through the Three Gorges is
considered a classic travel experience, as each bend in the river reveals a new perspective on the
marvels that geological change has wrought.
Balancing the desire to preserve the river in all its natural glory against that to tame it to control
flooding, generate power, and provide more reliable shipping conditions presents a classic dilemma
involving engineering and society. When nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen proposed a Three Gorges
dam in 1919, the ecological costs were overshadowed by the economic benefits for China. In the
mid-1940s, a preliminary survey, along with planning and design efforts, was carried out by the
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation under the direction of John Lucian Savage, designer of the Hoover and
Grand Coulee dams. In his exploratory role, Savage became the first non-Chinese engineer to visit
the Three Gorges with the thought of locating an appropriate dam site. Savage's work is the likely
inspiration for John Hersey's novel A Single Pebble, the opening sentence of which is, “I became
an engineer.” In the story, the unnamed engineer travels up the Yangtze in a junk pulled by trackers
in the ancient and, once, the only way to make the river journey.
Chairman Mao Zedong was a staunch supporter of a Three Gorges dam, which he felt would
provide a forceful symbol of China's selfsufficiency and ability to develop its resources without
western aid. As early as 1953, Mao expressed his preference for a single large dam rather than a
series of smaller ones, and he suggested that he would resign the chairmanship of the Communist
Party in China to assist in the design of the project. Mao's poem about being at ease swimming
across the Yangtze reflects on how all things change, like the swift river and the gorges through