News in 2020 that heavy rains in central China were flooding the Yangtze River reminded me of our trip to China, year 2000.
Four years after I retired as a Chapel Hill professor, Margaret and I booked a two-week excursion that included a five-day cruise up a not-so-lazy river. The Yangtze is filled with commercial boats of different sizes supplying river cities.
Halfway between Wuhan and Chongqing (yes, other old-timers ‘Chungking’) we went ashore, then took the bus tour to the visit the Three Gorges dam construction site. We were two years ahead of the scheduled completion.
We saw the seven lock reservoirs under bulldozer construction. When the dam was finished, boats from up and down river would use seven locks, a ‘ladder’ to move craft above and below the dam. Also the engineers planned a small-craft four-sided enclosure that would use water from the dam to lift small boats inside a water-tight shaft. I wished I could have seen that ‘boat elevator’ work.
When completed, hydro-electric power from the dam would extend as far north as Chongqing, south beyond Wuhan. We’dd seen the yellow smoke that factory smokestacks belched into the air. Damming the Yangtze River to provide cleaner electricity made welcome sense.
Next day our riverboat rounded the end of the dam not yet closed, and we continued upstream toward Chongqing . Signs along hills surrounding the river showed where water would be impounded when the dam was closed. At that dam-still-open time, we would have often been under more than 100 feet of water.
When I read recent Yangtze River news, I wondered what had I missed in the last twenty years. This year I’ve traveled online, a good substitute for we ‘love to travel’ virus shut-ins. Went to Wikimedia Commons, then typed in Three Georges Dam.
Wow. Good maps. Satellite photos. The Three Gorges hydro-electric dam has indeed electrified the Yangtze River valley. The dam has helped control floods for 18 years. But the electrical turbines have reduced some of the fish species. And the small-boat elevator didn’t become operational until two years ago.
At the bottom of a long Three Gorges Dam story, I read that Taiwan has threatened China communists they will blow up the dam if they go to war. From what we saw, that could be too dam bad.
Photo credit: Shutterstock, Sandouping/China 07/18/2019 photo
