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Posted on 05/14/2008 10:08:52 AM PDT by Nexus
HANWANG, China - Thousands of Chinese soldiers rushed on Wednesday to repair a dam badly cracked by the country's massive earthquake, while rescuers arrived for the first time in the epicenter of the disaster.
China's top economic planning body said that the quake had damaged 391 mostly small dams. It left "extremely dangerous" cracks in the Zipingpu Dam upriver from the earthquake-hit city of Dujiangyan and some 2,000 soldiers were sent to repair the damage, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Xinhua said Dujiangyan would be "swamped" if major problems emerged at the dam.
He Biao, the director of the Aba Disaster Relief headquarters in northern Sichuan province, said there were also concerns over dams closer to the epicenter.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
It's not the Three Gorges. I was curious about the same thing the other day and after some fiddling with google maps I was able to figure that Three Gorges is about 600 miles away from the quake zone. To the east.
I heard that they were troops pulled from rescuing trapped people in the rubble and sent up there immediately to help repair the dam.
They can’t get the equipment in there now with all the bridges and roads destroyed, all the manpower in the world can’t fix a dam like that, it takes engineers and equipment.
LOL! But that’s what makes this site great. Thanks again for the info.
600 miles isn’t all that far when it comes to plate tectonics, is it? I think I’m probably looking at it a little childishly. The cause and effect—the water weight pressing down on one part of the plate, causing another end to shift and rise—it seems plausible, in a five-year old kind of way. That can’t be all there is to it. If it were, the dam would never have been built in the first place, right? I’m either stupid or naive today.
I’ve heard that theory as well... that large reservoirs behind dams can cause earthquakes in nearby faults. I have no idea. It’s one of those things that sounds plausible.
I’m not a geologist and didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn, but I think it’s also likely that while a large lake ~seems~ like a lot of weight, it is still very, very small in comparison to the mass of the tectonic plate it sits on. The plate is miles thick and of course thousands of square miles in area. Lots of mass there.
A lake that averages... what... a hundred feet deep? That’s like a coffee cup on the deck of a battleship. Sure it might be the last little bit that makes it tip... but it had to be pretty close already, I’m thinkin’.
And then again, I could be wrong. Happens all the time. Maybe a geologist will show up and help.
Not if enough Conservatives shut off the fiscal ‘water’ upstream of the dam-nable.
A decent aftershock and it will be done, along with too many more people.
Lots of crazy glue.
ping
Nope, drain and repair.
“Concrete Replacement: Concrete replacement is required when one-half to one square foot areas or larger extend entirely through the concrete sections or where the depth of damaged concrete exceeds 6 inches. When this occurs, normal concrete placement methods should be used. Repair will be more effective if tied in with existing reinforcing steel (rebar). This type of repair will require the assistance of a professional engineer experienced in concrete construction.”
Notice the last line, foo’ed indeed.
ping for later
I read that article.
JEEZ LOUISE!
If it’s not one dam thing it’s another.
“Landslides had blocked the flow of two rivers in northern Qingchuan county, forming a huge lake in a region where 1,000 have already died and 700 are buried, Xinhua said.
“The rising water could cause the mountains to collapse. “
CAUSE THE MOUNTAINS TO COLLAPSE.
Hmmmmm........ we may just get to see how long it takes to form something like our Grand Canyon. Might only take a few days, for all we know.
“Damage to the two-year-old Zipingpu Dam threatened downstream communities still digging out from the quake. Some 2,000 soldiers were sent to the dam, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Four-inch cracks scarred the top of the dam, and landslides had poured down the surrounding hills, the business news magazine Caijing said on its Web site in a report from the scene.”
The activist group International Rivers Network was involved in a campaign in 2001 and 2002 to protest funding for the Zipingpu Dam because of its proximity to a fault line, said Aviva Imhoff, the group’s campaigns director.
Imhoff said the group obtained transcripts of a 2000 internal government meeting in which seismologists warned officials of the dangers of constructing the dam and the potential for it to be damaged in an earthquake, Imhoff said.
The massive Three Gorges dam, the world’s largest, is about 350 miles east of the epicenter.
“That’s like a coffee cup on the deck of a battleship.”
after reading the descriptions in the articles,
I’m thinking it would me more like Hundreds of Kiddie Pools on the deck of a battleship.
And you just hit some serious waves.
oops.
390+ kiddie pools.
and several backyard sized swimming pools.
Do they plan on using the soldiers, or just have them chew a lot of gum?
What they should, and probably do fear is the Domino Effect.
391 small dams are damaged.
Massive landslides have dammed up rivers, and may cause the mountains to collapse.
The Zipingpu dam has four inch cracks all over the top.
(four inches wide?long?deep?....they didn’t say)
More mudslides are anticipated with the coming heavy rains.
The Mudslides will cause a change in weight distribution, triggering more earthquakes.
The earthquakes will trigger more landslides, and more dam failures.
The landslides like the one near the Zipingpu Dam can create tsunami like waves which pound the dam.
If one large dam goes....
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