Kelowna, B.C. Local Resident Leads a Team of Researchers to the Three Gorges Dam

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During the last week in July, Kelowna resident, Dr. Mitchel Bloom, led a group of systems sciences researchers on an investigative journey in China to the Three Gorges Dam followed by a 510 kilometre boat trip up the Yangtze River. The purpose of the trip was to determine the consequences of the dam project, the largest construction project currently underway in the world. The team was interested in learning how the managers and engineers are coping with both the short and long-term positive and negative impacts of the dam. The positive impacts included power production and flood control on the river. The negative impacts involved a wide range of factors -- environmental, social, ecological, archaeological, economic, geological, financial and political.

In preparation, the team accessed Internet and library literature with particular attention to critics of the dam and formulated a list of questions related to publicly expressed concerns. This was translated into Chinese and forwarded ahead of their interviews with the managers and engineers. Because they intended to present their findings to the International Society of Systems Sciences Conference the following week in Shanghai, plus the prestige with which China welcomed the conference attendees, the research group was given Government cooperation and access to managers directly connected to and working on this project.

Upon landing in Shanghai, the team flew 900 kilometres west to Yichang and were bussed to the dam site 25 kilometres up-river. They spent the next two days visiting the dam site in the morning and holding interviews, using translators, with managers and engineers in the afternoon. On the third day, they toured the new city of Zigui, across the river from and which will replace the destroyed old city of Zigui. In new Zigui they interviewed the economic development administrator and a Chinese-Canadian who was in charge of investing a half-billion dollars (U.S.) supplied by a group from Hong Kong. In the afternoon they visited the Gezhouba Dam, the forerunner for the Three Gorges project, but much smaller in size and impact, and on which many lessons were learned. The team found that the Three Gorges Dam and the Gezhouba Dam were parts of the more monumental undertaking of an entire flood-control/electrical power system with more dams anticipated up river and along the several tributaries of the Yangtze, something not yet reported in the media.

Not all of the technical problems are solved, but the Three Gorges Dam itself is mostly complete now (phase 2) 2335 meters long, 84 meters wide and cresting 185 meters from the riverbed. The site is incredibly enormous, disappearing into a gray fog as you view it from the river bank. An entire mountain was reduced to rubble to make the granite cement used in construction. Whole cities stand devastated along the riverbanks from which 846,000 people will have been moved. New gleaming cities rise on the mountaintops. You have to visit to believe it. In October, the reservoir up river from the dam toward Chungqing will begin to rise and before 2009, the river level upstream will be 175 meters above its current level changing for ever the most scenic beauty in China – the area of the Three Gorges and Little Three Gorges on the Daning River, a tributary of the Yangtze. But the reservoir will allow large boats to penetrate up tributaries previously inaccessible except by small flat bottomed boats, having the unintended effect of opening up parts of central China to trade and tourism, a fact perceived by the Toronto investor.

Following the interviews and extensive examination of the dam site, the team cruised three days up-river from Yichang to Chungqing, the terminus of the flooded area where the water is expected to rise only 15 meters. They used the boat trip to tour the tributaries, take pictures of the destroyed and new cities, solidify their impressions and mull over the information they had gathered. The team analyzed the scope of the system of electrical power grid and water resource treatment and prepared to give their perspective on whether the dam will likely fulfill its builder’s expectations. They also examined the human factor issues in relocating people from their ancestral homelands and addressed the loss and displacement of art and archeological artifacts.

On August 4th,2002 the team made a 2-hour presentation to the International Society for the Systems Sciences Conference in Shanghai China. The topic was System Researchers Visit the Three Gorges Dam Project on the Yangtze River.

Dr. Henry Alberts contributed to the description of the Dam Talk Release.