Extreme flooding in China raises fears over the Three Gorges Dam

File photo of the Three Gorges Dam.

At least 14 people have been killed due to extreme flooding in China. Fox News. Three floodgates of the Three Gorges Dam are open due to the water levels being 50 feet above flood stage. The flooding above the dam has resulted in many deaths and over 1000 homes have been destroyed. The flood has peaked but more rain is expected on Tuesday. China usually has seasonal floods but the rainfall this year has been severe. Over 1 million people have been evacuated and more the $7 billion in damage has been caused by the floods. 

My Comment:

I've been following this story for awhile now but this is the first time I have covered it on my blog. In general, people online think that this is too much water for the Three Gorges Dam to handle and they fear that the dam may collapse. Outside of Taiwanese media, which has a good reason to exaggerate against China, most media is either ignoring the threat or towing the line for the Chinese, which is that the situation is under control. 

Is it though? It's very hard to tell. Though I am not convinced that the dam is going to collapse I am also convinced that if it was, China would never tell us. China would never lose face if they knew that their dam was in trouble. They would just try to solve the problem on their own and would only own up to it if it was in the process of failing. 

I'm leaning towards the dam being fine though. Dam collapses are fairly rare and this one is massive and over-engineered. Indeed, a much worse dam, the one in Mosul Iraq, hasn't failed and that dam is in a war zone. I'd be fairly surprised if the dam failed as I am sure it was designed to hold up under massive flooding given China's long history of floods. Indeed, part of the reason China built the dam was to protect against this kind of flooding. 

But if the Three Gorges Dam isn't ok and does collapse? It's going to be the worst man-made disaster in history. Hundreds of millions of people live near the Yangtze river, including the massive cities of Shanghai and Wuhan and if the dam goes then those cities will be severely damaged if not destroyed utterly. There would be a wall of water many feat high and though you might have enough time to evacuate it would cause massive damage and kill thousands of people, maybe millions. 

The damage this event would cause would be global. The cities along the Yangtze are the world's manufacturing center. Remember how bad supply lines got when Wuhan locked-down for the Coronavirus? Well this would be that times 100 and it would be a lot more difficult to recover from. The economic damage from the dam collapsing would cause global shortages of products and would disrupt economies world wide, probably leading to a new great depression. 

Still, I find this scenario unlikely. I'd like to believe that the Chinese are more capable of handling this crisis than that. Opening the flood gates and allowing some areas to flood is the right call here and I think it will relieve a lot of pressure on the dam. This should prevent a catastrophic failure of the dam. 

But if it does happen it will be the perfect cap off of a pretty terrible year. The Chinese government would likely crumble and with it most of the global economy. It would be the black swan event of all black swan events and would make the Coronavirus economic impact look like a joke...