Search China Travel News:

The Three Gorges Hydro-Power Project, upon completion in 2009, will serve as the backbone of China's flood-control bulwark in its efforts to harness the Yangtze, the country's longest river.

The river's eastward flow comes to a natural fall of over 100 meters in the area of the Three Gorges, located in central China's Hubei Province.

Ji Xuebing, a famous Chinese hydrologist, explained that the Three Gorges reservoir, built at the pass of the geographic fall, will effectively contain flooding and protect the vast downstream plains.

The Yangtze's flooding occurs when the flow from the upper reaches of the river exceeds the capacity of the middle and lower reaches of the river, he said, adding that the reservoir, which is designed to hold up to 175 meters of water with a maximum storage capacity of 22.15 billion cubic meters, will be able to contain even serious flooding incidents such as those seen only every 100 years.

If more severe flooding occurs, the reservoir will help to reduce flood water levels and ensure the safety of the embankments that protect the industrial hub of Wuhan, said Ji.

River flooding has long been one of the most serious natural disasters confronting China. In the past 2,000 years, spanning the Han (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) and Ming dynasties (1368-1644), 214 flooding incidents were recorded, an average of one every ten years.

In the 1998 Yangtze River flooding, when millions of civilians and soldiers were enlisted to reinforce the main embankments, over 1,000 people lost their lives. The total disaster-control cost and economic losses amounted to some 100 billion yuan.

The Three Gorges project will play only a minor role in flood-control in June 2003, when the water level in the partially-completed reservoir is expected to be 135 meters. At that time, the effective flood-control capacity of the reservoir will be 2.3 billion cubic meters, said Lu Youmei, general manager of the China Yangtze Three Gorges Project Development Co.

The Three Gorges Project is the world's largest hydro-power project in terms of concrete content, power generation capacity and navigation handling capability.

The amount of concrete used in the construction of the project is expected to reach 28 million cubic meters, and the project is designed to generate 84.7 billion kwh of electricity annually, compared with 12.3 million cubic meters of concrete and 75 billion kwh of power generation in the case of Brazil's Itaipu, the largest hydro-power project in the world at present.