20131001: Documentary Review: China's Mega Dam

China's Mega Dam

1. Fundamentals
1. American live action made for television special, 2006, Discovery Channel, documentary, 87 minutes.
2. IMDB: no entries
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 'No reviews yet,' and no audience ratings.
4. Narrator: Michael Carroll.
5. Director: Justin Albert.


2. Setup
1. The third longest river in the world is the Yangtze, in China.  It floods regularly, causing a great deal of damage.  The Chinese built a huge dam in the Three Gorges region to allow containment and control.


2. Backing up a bit, the film described diverting the river by digging an alternate route for most of the water, then forming a huge dry area across the original river bed where the dam's foundation will be laid.  This undertaking took considerable time.  Once the dry area was in place, the river was flowing through the new channel, and construction of the dam itself could start.  Construction started around 1994.


3. Progress depended on there not being any flash flooding occurring during the pouring and drying of the dam's cement.  It seems the Chinese got lucky on that score.


4. The created reservoir will be up to 500 feet above the original level, and will extend back from Three Gorges some 400 miles.  The number of people to be moved was expected to be 1.3 million.  Later estimates were around 2 million.  Two major cities, 140 towns, 1,350 villages, 100,000 acres of farmland are to be lost to this project, which will start in 2003, and be fully loaded around 2009.  In 2004, the reservoir was already longer than the Grand Canyon.


5. The social fallout of this bludgeoning policy was thorough.  Independent villages become segments in government constructed slums.  Villages, towns, connecting bridges, and farmland were swallowed up.


6. April 2002: engineers discover cracks in the main wall of the dam.  They are diagnosed as surficial and not a safety hazard.


7. The stories of Fengdu and Dachang were rather sad, especially for the family that had stayed in the same house in Dachang for 400 years.  This thread of the documentary showed the highest level of government censorship.


8. After the dam was solid the diversion channel was closed.  Ships now had to travel through huge locks that allow passage through the dam.


9. The river became navigable, due to its much greater depth, for hundreds of miles further upstream.


10. Temples: a few were saved; many were lost.


11. The weight of the dam is enormous, and there are concerns about earthquakes in the areas near the dam.


12. Bedload flow: the dam slowed the overall speed of the river, and the river started depositing upstream for that reason. Fortunately, the engineers built low-level sluice gates in the dam, so that the silt problem could be addressed.  Unfortunately, this was only near the dam.  Upstream there are still problems.  The river is more of a lake now.


13. Some villages are moved to the other side of the river.  Others are moved hundreds of miles away.


14. The electric generators in the dam are supposed to supply 10% of all China's needs.


15. There are almost too many superlatives in this film.  The largest turbines in the world.  The largest dam in the world.  The biggest reservoir in the world.  The largest construction cranes in the world (several types).  China is the biggest producer of coal in the world.  China is the largest consumer of coal in the world.  China is the biggest polluter in the world.  The dam's locks are the biggest in the world.  Part of the dam complex is a ship elevator, of course the largest in the world.


16. The dam is hoped to eliminate a good deal of coal burning, at least in the heavily populated areas near it, like Shanghai and Chongqing.  Chongqing has about 30 million people, a huge and growing auto/motorcycle construction industry, and competes with Shanghai as the center of capitalism.


17. Jungbu island was excavated starting in 1993, and remnants of the Ba people were discovered as well as many layers of habitation over centuries.  In all, the film claimed some 1,200 archaeological sites were covered by water in 2004.  Another 8,000 were identified as potential dig sites, but not started.


18. Looting: no surprise there.  Antiquities were dug up in many places and bought up by savvy gangs with good intelligence and cash on hand.  Burglaries from museums also rose considerably.


19. The lake behind the dam was estimated to grow to 36,000 square miles a bit larger than the Great Lakes in USA/Canada.  Hundreds of thousands of grave sites were submerged in this lake.  Buddhists are very upset with this huge loss.


20. Fuling: demolished a third of the city; built huge seawalls. Kept most of the city, but lost the eighth century carvings of fish below.


3. Conclusions
1. One sentence summary: The completion of the dam is a huge achievement with huge implications.
2. Four stars of five


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 7/10 There are too many minutes of soft focus.


2. Sound: 8/10 OK, no real problems.


3. Screenplay: 8/10 Repetitive; too much geared around the commercial breaks.  On Netflix I did not have to endure those, but still, they affected the pacing in a bad way.