China Floodwatch 2020-21 - Wuhan, Hubei/Henan Province is sinking and I dunno how to swim.

Is the Three Gorges Dam kill?

  • Yes

    Votes: 310 78.7%
  • No

    Votes: 84 21.3%

  • Total voters
    394
  • Poll closed .
On the /pol/ threads there were a bunch of nuke the reservoir shitposts which are obviously shitposts but what can China realistically do if things did get bad enough where they're faced with letting the dam burst or taking drastic measures?

Definitely not that. Nuking the reservoir would not make the water disappear. Instead of having a flood, you would have highly dispersed nuclear fallout in the form of "Black Rain". Which is some horrific stuff. When the US nuked Hiroshima, it vaporized a good chunk of the harbor water that came back down as black rain. Anyone who drank it died.
 
Dams withstand forces that would topple a skyscraper 24/7, just sticking a bunch of fertilizer on a boat and running it into the dam would probably accomplish jack shit. You'd need a very impressive or very focused explosion to crack a structure that holds back entire rivers. But if you did manage to put a dent in its integrity, even a fairly slight one, it would probably spark a chain reaction to complete failure in short order, given the stress it's currently under.
 
Yesterday Zheng Shouren, chief designer of the Three Gorges Dam, died at age 81 (or 80?) of an undisclosed illness in Wuhan (link in Chinese). Hope he can plead with the spirits in the afterlife to help his dam hold up.

Talk of a strange coincidence or is it a coincidence? "Undisclosed illness" raised me some eyebrows and I checked Wikipedia and they mentionned he was 80 years old.

Dams withstand forces that would topple a skyscraper 24/7, just sticking a bunch of fertilizer on a boat and running it into the dam would probably accomplish jack shit. You'd need a very impressive or very focused explosion to crack a structure that holds back entire rivers. But if you did manage to put a dent in its integrity, even a fairly slight one, it would probably spark a chain reaction to complete failure in short order, given the stress it's currently under.

Let's see if a "barge of peace" will come close to the 3GD.
 
Talk of a strange coincidence or is it a coincidence? "Undisclosed illness" raised me some eyebrows and I checked Wikipedia and they mentionned he was 80 years old.



Let's see if a "barge of peace" will come close to the 3GD.

Propably the Coof, and they don't want to admit someone famous died from it.
 
Yesterday Zheng Shouren, chief designer of the Three Gorges Dam, died at age 81 (or 80?) of an undisclosed illness in Wuhan (link in Chinese). Hope he can plead with the spirits in the afterlife to help his dam hold up.
Yesterday? As in... in 2020, yesterday?
:story: Yep - 24/07/20.

Give me a fucking break. As if that was a coincidence.
 
Have not seen these posted in a while: http://www.cjh.com.cn/swyb_sssq.html (Chinese source)

Here is a water flow chart for various locations. It's a bit rough as I copied/pasted in the translations, but you get the idea. It is dated the 25th of July and data was collected at 11AM. I am not sure why the incoming flow for Three Gorges is absent sometimes. But the CCP's efforts to lower the reservoir at the Three Gorges Dam seem to be working.
Water Flow Chart 4.png


Here are the last three charts that I saw posted in this topic for comparison. They are all from the 19th of July and reported at 9AM, 11AM, and 2PM respectively.
Water Flow Chart 1.png Water Flow Chart 2.png Water Flow Chart 3.png
 
So all that blowing up of upstream dams WORKED?! Or is it that they got a million monkeys with a million typewriters and wrote the complete works of Shakespeare shovels and made some diversions?
I don't think it is that surprising that blowing many of those dams has worked to help alleviate the pressure on the Three Gorges Dam. But it's still a terrible price to pay. The CCP has created dozens of smaller scale disasters by inundating towns and villages and flooding out precious farmland; but it may yet prevent total catastrophe which would be the result of the Three Gorges Dam failing.

And even with those actions taken, the areas downstream from the Three Gorges Dam are still under massive amounts of water and are being severely damaged. But they aren't being completely destroyed. So I guess that's a win... kind of. So any benefit the Three Gorges Dam was supposed to give to the Chinese public in the form of flood prevention is completely undermined. It's a PR and public planning disaster.

The issue of food production and storage is inevitable at this point though. With so much of China's shrinking farmland flooded out there's going to be a crunch when the cold weather hits. As others have said, many of these farms may not be usable next season either depending on how much of the soil has eroded and depending on what has been left behind by the floods. And with major urban centers and everything in between them suffering from inundation, granaries and other storage sites are surely going to have to dump their stock.

Compounded with the meat shortages and the diseases spreading through China's meat production infrastructure... plus China's belligerence over the last 18 months causing trade partners to back away... plus China willingly canceling many of its own meat/food import deals mere months before this flooding began... it's bad luck compounded on top of bad decisions and poor diplomacy. There are going to be some hungry people in China this Winter.

edit: Heck and I didn't even mention COVID. Throw that onto the pile as well. Yikes!
 
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...

Compounded with the meat shortages and the diseases spreading through China's meat production infrastructure... plus China's belligerence over the last 18 months causing trade partners to back away... plus China willingly canceling many of its own meat/food import deals mere months before this flooding began... it's bad luck compounded on top of bad decisions and poor diplomacy. There are going to be some hungry people in China this Winter.

Even more unsettling is that China doesn't have very many nearby breadbaskets they could co-opt/invade, like Poland/Ukraine.

What's unsettling about it, is that they have little hope/intention on continuing to feed such a massive population. Either they plan on letting COVID/natural disasters take their course, or China will bet on a decreased military Western readiness.

That's probably been their plan all along, but we haven't collapsed as quickly/totally as they'd hoped.

/Tinfoil off
 
Whether the dam breaks or not (and they will do anything and everything to prevent that) the flooding is really bad. The rainy season is just getting going and now several areas upstream now have no dams because they were destroyed, so all the water that would be held back will just go straight through. The areas which have had their flood control dynamited are fucked now, and will be even more fucked if the rain continues or worsens because the flooding will be uncontrolled and uncontrollable.
The TGD is still holding far more than it should at this point in the year and so areas downstream are fucked too because they will have to keep water going through. So yes, it’s failed in its primary purpose, which was to prevent this kind of thing, and it may have even made things far worse. If you think about those areas which had their dams dynamited - they had a dam, and so there will have been development and building and industrial areas etc downstream which wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
The TGD has been a colossal ecological and human catastrophe so far. If it fails that’s on another level but even as it is now, it’s failed to protect life, property and infrastructure
 
Chornobyl is "wormwood" in Ukrainian, btw.
Not quite. Wormwood, as in the plant, is "Полин гіркий" (polyn girkii) in Ukrainian or "Полынь горькая" in Russian. The Biblical one is called "Зоря Полин" (zorya polyn).
The name Chernobyl is instead based on the word for black, "чорні" (chernii). It also means "common mugworth" in some regions.
 
Even more unsettling is that China doesn't have very many nearby breadbaskets they could co-opt/invade, like Poland/Ukraine.

What's unsettling about it, is that they have little hope/intention on continuing to feed such a massive population. Either they plan on letting COVID/natural disasters take their course, or China will bet on a decreased military Western readiness.

That's probably been their plan all along, but we haven't collapsed as quickly/totally as they'd hoped.

/Tinfoil off

Apparently they're quite active in Ukraine and have a lot of presence in agribusiness. So...

@Badungus Kabungus

Not quite. Wormwood, as in the plant, is "Полин гіркий" (polyn girkii) in Ukrainian or "Полынь горькая" in Russian. The Biblical one is called "Зоря Полин" (zorya polyn).
The name Chernobyl is instead based on the word for black, "чорні" (chernii).

https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Полин_звичайний

От ти зараз мені будеш розповідати про чорнобиль (Artemisia vulgaris) lmao.
 
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> China and Ukraine
> Biden
:thinking:

Yeah, I know, sic your clocks on me. I'm done restating the obvious to blindered, earplugged people.

Take this particular thing with a grain of salt. It's one of those things people here know but I can't give you any evidence.

I do know that they've been using their money here quite a lot and they have a significant presence. I don't know the extent of it or the specifics.
 
https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Полин_звичайний
От ти зараз мені будеш розповідати про чорнобиль (Artemisia vulgaris) lmao.

" В этом тексте Иоанн Богослов приводит древнегреческое название полыни апсинтион (абсинтион, в другом прочтении акинтион), что означает «непригодное для питья». Сегодня считается, что под словом «апсинтос» подразумевалась полынь белотравная[4], или же полынь горькая, тогда как полынь обыкновенная — и только она — в те времена по-гречески называлась артемизией (αρτεμισία), в честь богини Артемиды. "

I posted too quickly, before adding the last part about common mugworth. It's a minor difference based on translation from the original Greek.

tl;dr version: Chernobyl means "common mugworth" (Artemisia vulgaris), Wormwood refers specifically to Artemísia absínthium.
 
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