Three Gorges Dam - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 140

It was dark when we left Gezhouba Dam and boarded the buses for the ride to Sandouping, the
base town for the Three Gorges dam project. We could not see the terrain through which we were
riding, but the grades of the hills and the rock slopes visible in the bus's headlights made it clear that
we were traveling through rough territory. The road was new, constructed to serve the project site,
and it led to a heavily guarded check station. At one point, we passed through a tunnel about two
kilometers long, suggesting that the mountains above us were too high or steep to put a road over.
After perhaps forty-five minutes of riding without seeing any significant number of lights, we came
upon Sandouping, a small town by Chinese standards but a bustling center beside the Yangtze. Our
hotel was a relatively new high-rise. From its windows we could see the outline of lights on the
cables of what must have been a major suspension bridge, suggesting that we were beside the river.
In the daylight, we would learn that the attractive and graceful structure was the Xiling Bridge, a
major span with well-proportioned white concrete towers and a strikingly slender red roadway. The
bridge seems to herald the dam, which was only a short drive from our hotel. On the way to the con-
struction site, we passed numerous warehouses and dormitories for workers. These latter, we were
told, will be converted into tourist accommodations. Dominating the route to the construction site
was a large pit where granite was being crushed into pieces of aggregate for the concrete. A system
of conveyor belts carried the stone over and along the road to the concrete plant. This location thus
provided not only a solid foundation for the dam itself but also a convenient source of one of the
principal materials for it.
The construction site was so large, extending well over a kilometer out from the riverbank and
into the riverbed, that it was hard to encompass in a single view. Perhaps the dominant first impres-
sion was the countless number of tall construction cranes, literally countless because they blended
into one another and disappeared behind one another. Our guide told us that we were finally seeing
a real yellow tower crane, as opposed to the mythical Yellow Crane that we had puzzled over in
Wuhan.
The first stop on the site was at the location of the locks. Twin pairs of five locks were being
carved out of solid granite and lined with concrete. They will carry ships and barges in stages
through the difference in water level behind and in front of the dam. Viewed from near the bot-
tom, the scale of this one aspect of the Three Gorges project was enormous. I certainly had never
seen anything like it, and I imagined that it rivaled even the construction of the individually larger
locks of the Panama Canal. Workers at the bottom of the man-made granite box canyons looked
minuscule, and it seemed impossible that these locks were blasted out of the granite in only a few
years' time. Our guide told us that the Chinese calligraphy atop a nearby promontory motivated
the workers to keep at the task with “first-class management, high-quality worksmanship, first-rate
construction.”
For American engineers, one notable feature of this Chinese construction site was the freedom
with which we visitors were allowed to move among the piles of construction materials and debris.
Such traipsing around (and without hard hats) is unheard-of at construction sites in the United
States. Only a simple railing with wide openings separated us from a thirty-meter fall into one of
the ship-lock excavations, but no one seemed to be bothered by the proximity to the precipice.