After killing 80,000 people and leaving 5 million homeless, scientists now speculate that the Chengdu Earthquake of last year may well have been caused by a large dam built frighteningly close to a fault line and only a few miles from the epicenter.
Check it out at Scientific American and The New York Times.
Upon first hearing the news, I assumed the dam they spoke of to be the Three Gorges Dam, ten times the hydroelectric size of the Hoover Dam and responsible for the displacement of over 1.4 million people. It is not - but certainly raises fears in my mind of how much greater the natural fallout from this project could be. Apparently, these damns are only two of many new, major hydroelectric dams in the earthquake prone southwest.
The Three Gorges Dam aside, the potential that the Chinese government could be partially responsible for such mass devastation is a weighty addition to the list of grievances Chinese people have toward the stewards of their society.
1 comment:
Hmmm...freudian slip on the word "dam" (sp. "damn" in one place)?
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