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2003-06-12 East Asia
Cracks surface in China’s Yangtze project
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Posted by Steve 2003-06-12 12:37 pm|| || Front Page|| [13 views since 2007-05-07]  Top

#1 I spent some time in construction (I am basically a jack of all trades, master of none) and you can tell a lot about a country's level of corruption by looking at the concrete. There are about a dozen ways to cheat and each one is easily diagnosed within a few months. The problem, AP, isn't the experts. It's usually the contractors. I once had the misfortune of watching a pour in Bolivia. It was the main road into La Paz. The existing concrete highway was gravel after a few years of use. For the new highway, they were using patio-grade reinforcing mesh. I'm sure that the original engineering drawings called out welded rebar and 5000 PSI concrete. I'm sure that somebody at the World Bank even signed off on those plans. I'm also sure that the contractor calculated the difference between rebar and mesh, and 5000 PSI concrete and 2000 PSI concrete and paid out some fraction of that in bribes and pocketed the rest.
Posted by 11A5S 6/12/2003 1:22:57 PM||   6/12/2003 1:22:57 PM|| Front Page Top

#2 Where's Noah when you need him.
Posted by RW 6/12/2003 9:31:13 PM||   6/12/2003 9:31:13 PM|| Front Page Top

#3 With quality control like this makes me want to sign up for the Chinese Manned Space Program.
Posted by Someone who did NOT vote for William Proxmire 2003-06-12 12:56:00||   2003-06-12 12:56:00|| Front Page Top

#4 Well it seemed like a good idea at the time...
Posted by tu3031 2003-06-12 12:59:58||   2003-06-12 12:59:58|| Front Page Top

#5 typically a dam like this in the U.S. would have movement detection monitors to note cracking, shifting. Wonder what their's is showing?
Posted by Frank G  2003-06-12 13:02:40||   2003-06-12 13:02:40|| Front Page Top

#6 Concrete pours for massive dams need more than Mao's Red Book for guidance. It takes special low-heat cement formulations and even refrigeration during the cure to avoid overheating. I wonder what experts they had. This whole thing has the making of a great catastrophe. I feel it in my bones......
Posted by Alaska Paul 2003-06-12 13:05:19||   2003-06-12 13:05:19|| Front Page Top

#7 If they admit there are problems, things must be really bad.

Definitely. They usually understate everything by a factor of at least 10 (like their SARS cases and resultant fatalities), so just put a zero after every stat and you're closer to the truth.
Posted by Dar  2003-06-12 13:18:52||   2003-06-12 13:18:52|| Front Page Top

#8 I spent some time in construction (I am basically a jack of all trades, master of none) and you can tell a lot about a country's level of corruption by looking at the concrete. There are about a dozen ways to cheat and each one is easily diagnosed within a few months. The problem, AP, isn't the experts. It's usually the contractors. I once had the misfortune of watching a pour in Bolivia. It was the main road into La Paz. The existing concrete highway was gravel after a few years of use. For the new highway, they were using patio-grade reinforcing mesh. I'm sure that the original engineering drawings called out welded rebar and 5000 PSI concrete. I'm sure that somebody at the World Bank even signed off on those plans. I'm also sure that the contractor calculated the difference between rebar and mesh, and 5000 PSI concrete and 2000 PSI concrete and paid out some fraction of that in bribes and pocketed the rest.
Posted by 11A5S 2003-06-12 13:22:57||   2003-06-12 13:22:57|| Front Page Top

#9 I hope the people that are in danger know what a POS this thing is, but somehow I don't Chinas PR machine has let that happen.
Posted by Mike N. 2003-06-12 13:23:01||   2003-06-12 13:23:01|| Front Page Top

#10 Didn't somebody say around here recently that most dam collapses occur during the initial filling of the lake? How many dams have collapsed to give a good record? (I'm just curious.)

I lived through a dam collapse in Rapid City, South Dakota around 1974 (?). I was in kindergarten and an earthen dam gave way. There was an old train engine at a park near my house (which was on a hill, thankfully) and they never found the thing.

My dad (an USAF officer at the time) got put on "Search and Rescue" (what means, 'Find the Bodies'). It was a mess. This thing in China is so big it's almost unimaginable what it would be like if that thing goes.
Posted by Laurence of the Rats  2003-06-12 13:45:17||   2003-06-12 13:45:17|| Front Page Top

#11 11A5S---You are right on the mark! QC may be the difference between life and death here. I remember talking to a Turkish engineer about bad concrete and "courtesy" rebar on buildings, especially concrete ones. We get spoiled in the US, though we still have our corruption and product failure issues.
Posted by Alaska Paul 2003-06-12 13:50:37||   2003-06-12 13:50:37|| Front Page Top

#12 Here's some more backround:
"During the inspection, for example, we found that some of the vertical cracks on the dam that were repaired have reopened, even though we put a great deal of money and effort into the repair work. It appears that during the concrete pouring, we put too much emphasis on the goal of achieving a very high degree of strength. But it has turned out that a high degree of strength does not necessarily mean good quality in a concrete dam. We have achieved an unnecessarily high degree of strength and a lot of cracks in the dam by pouring too much concrete and spending a great deal of money."
It started cracking before the fill began, on the upstream (water) side.
Numerous cracks in the dam were discovered in October, 1999, but only revealed in March last year by the popular South Wind Window magazine, a sister publication of the Guangzhou Daily. After visiting the dam, reporter Zhao Shilong wrote that he had seen cracks stretching from top to bottom of the huge concrete structure. After the problem was brought to light, Lu Youmei, general manager of the Three Gorges Project Development Corp., acknowledged in Three Gorges Project Daily that cracks had appeared on the whole upstream face of the 483-metre-long spillway section, and that they extended from 1 metre to 1.25 metres into the dam. For his part, Zhang Chaoran, chief engineer of the Three Gorges Project Development Corp., said: “This is a normal phenomenon, and cracks such as these can be observed in almost all large dams around the world.” But he also said: "Our problem was that we failed to take the cracks seriously at first. We didn’t think they would develop so quickly or so dramatically, beyond our expectations.”
And then there's this goody:
The monitoring of dam safety in China is hampered by a severe shortage of funds and personnel, the China Economic Times reports, warning that the system is "in chaos." With an annual budget of 800,000 yuan RMB (less than US$100,000), the Dam Safety Monitoring Centre in Beijing can barely run its day-to-day operations and pay its 37 staff members, let alone function as an effective inspector of China's dams, the newspaper said.
Most of China's 84,000 dams were built hastily in the 1950s and 1960s, and many are considered at risk of collapse. It cited the 1975 disaster, when 230,000 people are thought to have died after the Banqiao and Shimantan dams in Henan province broke during a typhoon; and the 1993 Gouhou dam failure in Qinghai province, which claimed about 300 lives and caused economic losses of 153 million yuan RMB (US$18.5 million), a huge sum in a poor area. The Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze River is located 200 kilometres upstream of Jinsha (population two million) and 700 km upstream of Wuhan (pop. seven million).
Leading scientists have warned that filling the huge reservoir behind the dam could cause increased seismic activity and geological instability in a region already prone to earthquakes and landslides. Zhang Jiyao, China's vice-minister of water resources, told a national conference last year that 3,459 dams, most of them considered small-scale, had collapsed between 1954 and 2001. He attributed the high failure rate to faulty construction, lack of safety awareness, negligence and mismanagement, and called for improved dam-safety institutions and inspections. But dam safety inspections, which are supposed to take place every five years, "are not going very well," China Economic Times reports. "The inspection is usually organized by the operator of the dam or hydropower station rather than by a more independent organization such as the Dam Safety Monitoring Centre." And to save time and money, the operators invite as few experts as possible to take part in the inspection, and ignore or curtail important parts of the process, the newspaper said.
Start running now!
Posted by Steve  2003-06-12 14:10:12||   2003-06-12 14:10:12|| Front Page Top

#13 I did a lot of emergency response work in the Air Force, looking at aerial imagery of the aftermath of tornados, floods, hurricanes, avalanches, mudslides, earthquakes, a couple of volcanic eruptions, and a tidal wave. Nature unleashed is a traumatizing experience. I would NOT want to live on the floodplain below the Three Gorges dam. We did some calculations in the early 1980's on the potential destruction if the Aswan Dam collapsed. Aswan's a long way from Cairo, but we still calculated the survival rate would be below ten percent. Mud and debris would be pushed halfway to Cyprus. THe Three Gorges dam is bigger, will contain more acre-feet of water, and has a steeper gradient through the upper Yangtse River than the Aswan/Nile scenario. The Chinese area also has about 20 times the population of ALL of Egypt. If the Three Gorges dam collapses after reaching 75% or more of capacity, we could be looking at a death toll of several hundred million people, and the TOTAL collapse of the Chinese economy.
Posted by Old Patriot  2003-06-12 14:10:33||   2003-06-12 14:10:33|| Front Page Top

#14 Of course, instead of pouring money into missiles aimed at Taiwan, they could have spent the necessary resources ensuring the safe construction. Political hegemony wins over interests of the population. Will a failure of the Dam spark an uprising? I would hope so, but....
Posted by Frank G  2003-06-12 14:23:09||   2003-06-12 14:23:09|| Front Page Top

#15 Frank,
I'm afraid we'll see something even more destabilizing than an "uprising". IF the Three Gorges Dam breaks, the economic collapse of China will make our "Black Thursday" in 1929 seem like a birthday party. The repercussions will affect every nation and every company on this planet. We're talking about a 100+ foot high wall of water moving at 70-80 miles an hour along the path of least resistance. It won't leave a bridge, road, house, field, or anything else but a scoured path of mud and debris behind it.
Posted by Old Patriot  2003-06-12 15:01:09||   2003-06-12 15:01:09|| Front Page Top

#16 OP beat me to it,expect to see millions die.
I live about 5 mile s from Roosevelt Lake(largest lake completely within the state)It is the first in a chain of four dams.If Roosevelt goes so does Phoenix.
Posted by raptor  2003-06-12 15:09:45||   2003-06-12 15:09:45|| Front Page Top

#17 Given the accounts above, please tell me that our goverment is actually guarding our dams.
Posted by John L 2003-06-12 15:17:04||   2003-06-12 15:17:04|| Front Page Top

#18 Damn dam.
Posted by Yosemite Sam 2003-06-12 15:30:21||   2003-06-12 15:30:21|| Front Page Top

#19 Laurence otR: I was five at the time of the Rapid City Flood (June 9-10, '72) growing up in Custer about an hour south, and I still remember that night. My older brother was in the NG in Chamberlain which was also called out to help.

There are some pictures of the Rapid City flood aftermath at this site.

Now living in Pittsburgh, I've visited the Nat'l Memorial site near Johnstown and visited the Flood Museum in town as well. For any of you travelling through western PA, a stop at either site is a very moving experience. The Nat'l Memorial is at the site of the dam that burst, and their documentary movie won an Oscar the year it was produced.
Posted by Dar  2003-06-12 15:38:54||   2003-06-12 15:38:54|| Front Page Top

#20 Rest easy, John L: I had the privilege of visiting the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River (#3 in the United States in size, #1 in backed up water behind it). The security was impressive. When we went back to take a raft trip down the river, security was tight also.

I saw the movie "Dam busters" a while back. It is actually a very tough problem to bring down a big, well constructed Dam, never mind the associated hazards of the AA fire the dam busters met.

Rest easy: The terrorists we know of aren't smart enough to take down a dam, nor have the insight to use any nuke they have to take one out and cause more damage than using the nuke to take out a city.
Posted by Ptah  2003-06-12 15:43:16|| [www.crusaderwarcollege.org]  2003-06-12 15:43:16|| Front Page Top

#21 You people are scaring the hell out of me. Thank God I'm a righ-wing survivalist.
Posted by Secret Master 2003-06-12 16:18:40|| [www.budgetwarrior.com]  2003-06-12 16:18:40|| Front Page Top

#22 Holy Hydraulic Grade Line Batman! I reread the postings and I feel Secret Master's fear. Well, what's next after we have stirred ourselves up?
Posted by Alaska Paul 2003-06-12 16:33:56||   2003-06-12 16:33:56|| Front Page Top

#23 Dar,

Thanks for that link. I'm going to send it on to my family. My own memories of the flood are mostly just that there was water at the bottom of the hill and we could couldn't go anywhere, and my dad was gone "to the Air Force" for days.

Several years ago I found a small booklet in my parents house that was printed sometime after the flood that had pictures and a description of events. I wonder if they still have it.

This thread has been really interesting, I had no idea that dam in China was such a possible danger. Why aren't we reading more about this in the regular news?
Posted by Laurence of the Rats  2003-06-12 16:38:46||   2003-06-12 16:38:46|| Front Page Top

#24 I found this Canadian website on the Three Gorges.Recommended.Contains a news archive.
Posted by El Id  2003-06-12 17:43:00||   2003-06-12 17:43:00|| Front Page Top

#25 Where's Noah when you need him.
Posted by RW 2003-06-12 21:31:13||   2003-06-12 21:31:13|| Front Page Top

#26 I was working a contract for a federal water management agency some years back. There was a lot of rain, and the local papers accused the feds of opening all the floodgates on one of the dams.
What they'd actually done was open two of the smaller floodgates to prevent the dam from being overtopped. One of the engineers explained to me, "If we'd opened all the gates, downtown xxx would be under 16 feet of water."
Posted by Dishman  2003-06-12 21:57:46||   2003-06-12 21:57:46|| Front Page Top

#27 I have been in some of our dams and have spent my life pouring concrete, believe me, they are more structurally sound than the Twin Towers. I have seen the motion detectors that would show a hundredth of an inch movement if it happened.
As to the Chinese, well we do know that they are looking for new ways to reduce their population.
Posted by okie 2003-06-12 22:31:04||   2003-06-12 22:31:04|| Front Page Top

20:12 Anonymous4779
08:14 raptor
07:38 raptor
07:36 raptor
07:34 raptor
03:32 Brian
01:19 Mike Kozlowski
01:05 Anonymous
01:04 Anonymous Troll
23:42 Tresho
23:15 Anonymous
22:53 okie
22:33 Woodland Critter
22:31 okie
22:24 RW
22:16 okie
22:02 RW
21:57 Dishman
21:50 RW
21:47 RW
21:32 Alaska Paul
21:31 RW
21:17 RW
21:06 RW









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