damn, what a dam!

The Three Gorges Dam that spans the Yangtze River in China has developed a slight "deformation," according to this Asia Times article.

In a rare revelation, Beijing has admitted that its 2.4-kilometer Three Gorges Dam spanning the Yangtze River in Hubei province “deformed slightly” after record flooding.

The official Xinhua News Agency quoted the operator of the the world’s largest hydroelectric gravity dam as saying that some nonstructural, peripheral parts of the dam had buckled.

The dam was a pet project of the late Premier Li Peng and a monumental pride of the nation when it blocked and diverted Asia’s largest river in 1997.

The deformation occurred last Saturday when the flood from western provinces[,] including Sichuan and Chongqing along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River[,] peaked at a record-setting 61,000 cubic meters per second, according to China Three Gorges Corporation, a state-owned enterprise that manages the dam and the sprawling power plant underneath it.

The company noted that parts of the dam had “deformed slightly,” displacing some external structures, and seepage into the main outlet walls had also been reported throughout the 18 hours on Saturday and Sunday when water was discharged though its outlets.

Not to worry, though: the Chinese government assures us everything is fine:

Xinhua also stressed in its report that all metrics were still up to standard and all the variables being monitored fell within the design parameters.

Meanwhile, Wang Hao, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an authority on hydraulics who sits on the Ministry of Water Resources’ Yangtze River Administration Commission, has also assured that the dam is sound enough to withstand the impact from floods twice the mass flow rate recorded on Saturday.

Still, Wang’s remarks stoked a volley of mockery after he said the flooding could be a good thing as the dam would only become more rigid the longer it was steeped up to its top.

I found this interesting:

It is believed that the dam’s operator must protect the central megacity of Wuhan, whose 10 million residents are still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic that erupted there in December.

That would be God's proper punishment if Wuhan got annihilated by the collapse of the Three Gorges Dam: give the world a virus, get your ass flooded. That'd be some Old Testament-style justice—God makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the righteous and the wicked alike! Joking aside, let's hope the dam does its job and doesn't collapse. I just looked to see whether a potential flood might affect Korea in some way, but the dam is way too far southwest to be a threat to the Korean peninsula. Only China would be affected, it seems, although it's interesting to note that the Yangtze first flows southeast from the Three Gorges Dam, then flows northeast up to Wuhan, which has about the population of Seoul.