Thousands of tonnes of garbage washed down by recent torrential rain are threatening to jam the locks of China’s massive Three Gorges Dam and is in places so thick people can stand on it, state media said yesterday.
Chen Lei, a senior official at China Three Gorges Corp, told the China Daily that 3,000 tonnes of garbage was being collected at the dam every day, but there was still not enough manpower to clean it all up.
“The large amount of waste in the dam area could jam the miter gate of the Three Gorges Dam,” Chen said, referring to the gates of the locks which allow shipping to pass through the Yangtze River.
The river is a crucial commercial artery for the upstream city of Chongqing and other areas in China’s less-developed western interior provinces.
Pictures showed a huge swathe of the waters by the dam crammed full of debris, with cranes brought in to fish out a tangled mess, including shoes, bottles, branches and styrofoam.
About 50,000m² of water had been covered by trash washed down since the start of the rainy season last month, the report said. The trash is about 60cm deep and in some places so compacted people can walk on it, the Hubei Daily reported.
“Such a large amount of debris could damage the propellers and bottoms of passing boats,” Chen said. “The decaying garbage could also harm the scenery and the water quality.”
The Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest hydropower project and was built partly to tame flooding along the Yangtze, which killed more than 4,000 people in 1998 and countless more over the centuries.
Enormously expensive and disruptive, the dam has cost more than 254 billion yuan (US$37.5 billion) and forced the relocation of 1.3 million people to make way for the reservoir. Towns, fields and historical and archaeological sites have been submerged.
Environmental activists have warned for years that the reservoir could turn into a cesspool of raw sewage and industrial chemicals backing onto nearby Chongqing and fear that silt trapped behind the dam could cause erosion downstream.
China has made scant progress on schemes drawn up nearly a decade ago to limit pollution in and around the reservoir.
Chen said about 10 million yuan is spent each year clearing 150,000m³ to 200,000m³ of floating waste by the dam.
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