Massive dam passes 1st real test

The Yangtze River, flowing more than 3,900 miles from the mountains of Tibet through fertile plains here in Hubei province and on to the East China Sea, was playing its traditional life-giving role Thursday, feeding the Chinese economy as it has for centuries.


As barges laden with goods churned upstream and irrigation canals branched out like capillaries, the river's even flow seemed in many ways remarkable. Other rivers in China have swollen out of their banks, with floods killing about 700 people and causing an estimated $7 billion in damage to buildings and farmland over the past two weeks.

The Yangtze's flow across the Hubei flatlands marks the latest chapter in China's millenary struggle to control its waters. Since before written history began, the river has alternated between giving life to China's farmers through irrigation and killing them through seasonal flooding.

The cycle always seemed beyond man's control. But this year, for the first time, the mammoth Three Gorges Dam, 220 miles upstream from here, was used to regulate the river, releasing limited amounts of water and trapping the excess of summer rains in a huge reservoir.

The engineers who have run the dam since it was finished a year ago said the 606-foot-high structure, the world's largest flood-control and hydroelectric barrier, passed its first real test as the waters peaked Tuesday. Boat traffic was halted as engineers let up to 48,000 cubic meters per second rush through 18 giant sluices. But the rest of the backed-up water stayed on the other side of the 7,575-foot-wide concrete barrier, in a pool stretching back more than 100 miles between steep gorges.

Hubei provincial officials predicted the riverbed could handle the limited flow as it headed downstream to the Yangtze's mouth just north of Shanghai. The water level at Shashi, about 50 miles upstream from here, peaked at the 43-meter danger level, they reported; by Wednesday, it had started to decline.