China has warned that the massive Three Gorges Dam faced its largest-ever flood surge, as Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) toured one of the areas hardest hit by a wave of flooding this summer.
About 74,000m3 of water per second was expected flow into the Three Gorges reservoir and the Cuntan area in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River yesterday and today, the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources said.
The peak flow was expected to be the most severe since in almost four decades and largest since the construction of the dam, the ministry said.
Photo: AFP
Since June, the dam has weathered a bout of severe flooding, which has affected more than 63 million people nationwide and caused about 178 billion yuan (US$26 billion) of economic damage, the Chinese Ministry of Emergency Management has said.
On Tuesday, Xi inspected flood-control measures on the Huai River, another flood-prone waterway in the adjacent Anhui Province.
Xi urged efforts to modernize flood prevention measures, adding that China had been “fighting natural disasters for millennia,” Xinhua news agency reported.
“We will need to continue the fight,” Xi said. “This fight needs to respect nature and follow the law of nature, and to coexist with nature harmoniously.”
The floodgate that Xi visited in Fuyang city was near a flood diversion area where authorities last month released 375 million cubic meters of water, submerging dozens of villages and swamping thousands of hectares of crops.
The release of floodwater in Anhui’s Mengwa area on July 20 marked the first time in 13 years that authorities had taken such action.
The trip by Xi on Tuesday highlighted the risk not only to life and property, but also the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has been criticized for past struggles to control the country’s flood-prone rivers.
The tour represented Xi’s first public appearance since July 31, when he attended a ceremony marking the completion of China’s BeiDou satellite-navigation system.
Such mid-August reappearances by top Chinese leaders are widely anticipated each year as confirmation that the CCP’s annual summer meetings in the resort area of Beidaihe have wrapped up.
The record floods were unlikely to cause major safety risks to the Three Gorges Dam, the state-run Science Daily has reported, citing its maximum inflow capacity of 98,800m3 per second.
Yet as the dam accelerates discharges to prepare for the inflows, downstream areas of the Yangtze face increased risk of flooding.
Chongqing, the sprawling southwestern city sitting on the upper reaches of the river, has raised its emergency response level to the highest level.
On Tuesday, water lapped at the feet of a 1,000-year-old giant Buddha sculpture along the river for the first time in more than 70 years, illustrating the extent of the floods.
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