China’s Three Gorges Dam is holding up against its first major flood-control test. The flow on the Yangtze River’s upper reaches topped 70,000 cubic metres a second Tuesday – 20,000 more than the flow during the 1998 floods that killed 4,150 people and the highest level since the dam was completed last year.
Hundreds of people have lost their lives or missing due to floods and landslides across China in this year’s catastrophe, but it could have been much worse without the dam. It thus provides a bit of morale boost for the mega project – the world’s largest of its kind – which was sometimes criticised for the environmental damage and forced relocation of 1.4 million people from the reservoir zone.
