The Three Gorges stuff is spin to flesh out the article.
The author frets about the three gorges hype and leaves out the important part of the flooding. Further, believe it or don’t, there is also severe drought to the north of the flooded areas in Central China.
There are lots of videos of the flooding all mention the three gorges dam but there are other dams in worse shape and it seems lots of what they call dams and we think of as levees. Those levees prevent flooding of bottoms where there were crops growing. Those levees were purposely broken to relieve the river flood pressure down stream. There are many videos of the levees being parted by large excavators.
Further, there are cities and towns and villages all along the Tangtze river and tributaries that have been seriously flooded or just washed away in the torrent. There are endless videos of submerged cars and trucks in the middle of a river that stretches as far as you can see to the side. There are cars literally floating down the river. There are fantastic land slides. there are bridges shown as they collapse. There are multistory buildings toppling into the flood. There are doomed hogs swimming in the water above their flooded pens.
In New Orleans, there were hundreds of thousands in peril. In China, there are tens of millions in similar peril.
There is some talk of the excess flow resulting from op0ening flood gates on various dams opening the government to lawsuits for damages. It seems that the government is not liable until the flood gates are opened. Guess they have ambulance chasers in China too.
Bottom line. The extent of the flooding is incalculable and will seriously affect the whole chinese economy. China will desperately need food and American farmers and vendors will supply some of it. Do you own commodity company stocks?
There are many engineering solutions for storing large amounts of excess rain, some cheaper than others. Los Angeles built the huge Santa Fe Dam which is a normally dry flood control dam, but later they dug large spreading grounds next to it where almost all excess water is now sent underground. The cheapest solution of all might be to breed beavers to build mini-dams all over, and encourage them by diverting the creeks around.