Environmental Problems Snowballing In Wake Of 3 Gorges, Just As Activists Had Warned - WP

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But the breaking-in period has also shown how vast the environmental damage is likely to be -- and how expensive to handle. Lei Hengshun, an engineering professor at Chongqing University who has followed the Three Gorges project since its inception, said it has opened a "bottomless pit" of government expenditures that will have to go on for decades.

A group of hydraulic engineers and environmentalists reported in March that the overall number of landslides in the area, including small ones, surpassed 4,700, requiring reinforcement or evacuation of 1,000 localities. Higher and less stable water levels behind the dam, now at almost 500 feet above sea level and scheduled to rise to 575 feet, already have altered pressure bearing on the base of majestic cliff sides, they explained, causing the perennially unstable ground to give way more often up and down the reservoir.

Along the cliff-side road to Miaohe, on the south bank about 20 miles upstream from the dam, a man with a shovel patiently repaired one such slide on a recent afternoon. Just across the river, on the north bank, a small ferry landing had been buried under another slide, forcing travelers to climb over a mound of earth to board. Concrete reinforcements have been erected nearby to keep both lanes clear on the main east-west road along the north bank.

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In addition to the landslides, he noted, industrial pollution, fertilizer runoff and waste from Chongqing and other cities have thickened in the backed-up reservoir waters, just as he and others predicted they would. Downstream, he said, Shanghai has noticed seawater moving inland because of a change in the flow of water carried down the river on its 3,900-mile journey from Tibet to the East China Sea. Lei, the Chongqing University professor, was among a group of government officials, environmentalists and engineers who warned in September that a "catastrophe" could befall the Yangtze River unless the government faces up to the environmental ills intensified by the dam and takes the costly measures necessary to confront them.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/14/AR2007111402563.html

What, 6 years ago, maybe? I wanted to cry, so much enviromental and human damage being done. Families forced out of places they'd lived for centuries, or millenia.

The environmental damage, and the thought that we can just reshape the earth on this scale without physics and erosion and entropy fighting back seems, well, absurd to me.