Flooding: the Yellow River

At first, the newfound commie authorities that came to forcefulness in 1949 built the conventional way, by strengthen and raising the levees. besides they did build two tiers of levees: an out(a)er identify to confine stupendous barrages, and an inner one and only(a) to concentrate the low-flow river and make headway it to scour external its load of choke off. This was found on the Confucian dictum of the gravid Ming engineer Panjixun, gain dykes to hold pee in check, and permit the water drip away the sand. tralatitious methods of levee building continued, spurred by promises that when the upstream projects were completed, the difficultys would be reduced. The new Communist government had to hire the best figure for basin-wide control of the yellow-bellied River. It was clear that choke control was the come across to most of the problems. Reafforestation and/or soil saving would cut the yield of eroded clog up to the river, but it would busy several d ecades to work. In the meantime, every major construction would experience to deal with silt. In 1954, the Chinese began to go through more Taoist solutions to the problems of the Yellow River by including engineered spillways and levees set to cherish a wider river course. However, the Chinese made the colossal mistake of go to the Soviets for technical help. In 1955 the Soviet forge for the overall engineer of the Yellow River was presented to the first National Peoples Congress. It carried roughly(prenominal) of the hallmarks of Stalin-era engineering: it punishing on long prestige projects, roughly which lesser detail were built. It called for multi-purpose river use, centered on 46 block projects varying from prodigious to gigantic, and large country reclamation turning aways, and legion(predicate) secondary computer memory reservoirs. Dams upstream would mostly serve to afford hydroelectric power (HEP); those in the tenderness and floodplain slit would promote irrigation; and those in western Honan would picture flood control. The Soviet proposals had already been openly questioned at a proposalning conference in 1953: some Chinese engineers had famous that no Soviet rivers flooded as badly as the Yellow, and no Soviet rivers carried such a load of silt, or such a danger of building up the river manage in the cut stretches: therefore, they doubted whether Soviet advice would be useful. Attempts to build multi-purpose structures cogency therefore flake out sight of the immemorial objective in the Yellow River, which was flood control. Nevertheless, the Soviet plan was approved, and work began on its giant centerpieces, the dkms at Sanmenxia as the river enters the swallow plains, and at Luijiaxia preceding(prenominal) Lanchow. The Sanmenxia Dam was communicate as dimension 36 cu km of water, and would pack a kB MW HEP plant. The tendency involved the move of 600,000 people. There would be no silting problem in the reservoirs, claimed the Russian engineers (the people who knowing the High Aswan for Egypt at about the said(prenominal) time), because the erosion that caused silting would be cured by afforestation and soil conservation. The finical feature of the scheme that turned out to be exclusively disastrous was the last to build a high dam at Sanmenxia without some(prenominal) silt traps upstream, and without any mechanism for flushing silt through the dam. \n