China Shuts Dam Gates to Block the Mighty Yangtze

By Brian Rhoads

BEIJING (Reuters) - China blocked the massive Yangtze River Sunday, starting
to fill a reservoir for the world's biggest hydroelectric project that is a
point of national pride but that critics fear will become an environmental
nightmare.

Live television pictures showed cascades of white water roaring as sluice
gates drew slowly shut on the Three Gorges dam, China's biggest engineering
project since the Great Wall was built more than 2,000 years ago.

The Xinhua news agency said 19 of the 22 gates at the dam in Yichang, in the
central province of Hubei, closed by mid-morning, blocking the flood-prone
Yangtze to form what will become a 365-mile reservoir.

"The project to close the gates to fill the Three Gorges reservoir is
successful," it said.

China says the world's largest hydroelectric project is critical for
national power needs and will help tame the 3,900-mile Yangtze, whose annual
floods have killed 300,000 people in the last century alone.

"When the entire project is completed in 2009, it will be highly effective
for flood control, power generation, navigation, ecological protection and
water diversion," Xinhua said.

But critics at home and abroad say the $25 billion project, begun in 1993,
will bring ecological disaster as pollution seeps from the remnants of
deserted towns, villages, factories and hospitals on the reservoir bed.

More than 720,000 people -- from fishermen to farmers -- along the Yangtze
were uprooted, and more than one million will move before the reservoir
swallows lands -- and some archeological treasures -- across about a dozen
counties.

The project also has been plagued over the past decade by corruption and
discovery of hundreds of cracks in the dam, though the Guangzhou Daily
Sunday quoted officials as saying the cracks, some tens of yards long, were
not a danger.


UPROOTED


Despite the live coverage, word of the event failed to reach the ears of
many relocated to Chongming Island at the mouth of the Yangtze far to the
east near Shanghai. Farmer Ke Chungui, 49, heard of it first from a foreign
reporter and then caught the broadcasts on a radio.

Ke, his feet clad in straw shoes, said he had been unable to find work since
being moved from Yunyang County in Chongqing municipality three years ago.

"They lied to us again. They promised us a better life here. We're much
worse off," he said, speaking in the thick Sichuan accent of central China.

China's leaders have dwelled on the power and flood control benefits of the
biggest Chinese engineering project since Emperor Qinshihuang built the
Great Wall more than 2,000 years ago.

Two 700 megawatt generators will fire up in August and 26 turbines are to
pump out 18,200 megawatts by 2009 -- equivalent of 10 coal-fired power
stations using 50 tons of coal a year.

Revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen first proposed building the dam in 1919,
but technical obstacles and social upheaval relegated the plan to the
drawing board for 70 years.

Chinese leaders from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin weighed in
with support over the years.

There was markedly less fanfare Sunday. The main players on television were
not Chinese leaders but engineers and project heads -- who closed the gates
with clicks of a computer mouse.

Some gates shut days ago, and water levels had already climbed to 106 meters
(yards) by Sunday morning. Three of the 22 gates will remain open to
guarantee water flow on the Yangtze during the two weeks it takes to fill
the reservoir to 135 meters.

Navigation resumes on June 16 on the Yangtze after a break of more than 60
days. The water is to rise even more next year, eventually creeping past a
sign on the green hills above the dam -- "150" -- on its way to 175 meters
by 2009.




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