According to meteorologists, weeks of heavy rains should last until next week. During that time, the level of 148 Chinese flows has already risen, which is what according to Radio Free Asia (RFA) has claimed the lives of at least 20 people and evacuated 40,000 people. Among the victims are eight children who played near a flooded river. The Hong Kong informed about it daily South China Morning Post.
That this is the biggest flood since the 1940s was also confirmed by Taiwanese server Taiwan News. While both Hong Kong and Taipei report on the disaster, the Chinese media ignore it. Experts believe that the reason lies in the earlier controversy over the safety of the Three Gorges Dam, which retains part of the water.
The dam is located on the Yangtze River in the province of Hubei in central China and is the largest hydroelectric power plant in the world. It is a two-kilometer-long and 185-meter-high building. Beijing has always boasted about it and shown it to be the greatest success of Chinese construction. Work on it was completed in 2006 and according to expert server Interesting Engineering is currently able to supply electricity to up to 60 million people with an annual saving of 30 million tons of coal.
However, its opponents point to the displacement of 1.3 million people during construction, the impact on the environment and, among other things, on safety. Chinese hydrologist Wang Wei-luo, who lives in Germany, has no confidence in its safety due to the speed of construction, which took only twelve years. He cited a conflict of interest as a reason, when the building was approved by people who also built it. Concerns include, for example, cracks and unsuitable concrete. The Australian informed about it TV 7News.
The hydrologist warns of an increased risk of the dam rupturing, which could have catastrophic effects on Wuhan or Shanghai, with 400 million people lying downstream. For this reason, Wang advised the people there to consider a possible rapid evacuation.
Beijing: Only slander by foreign media
According to the Chinese government, any doubts about the safety of the dam are just a slander for some Western media. He rules out the threat of rupture and argues the findings of a Chinese earthquake administration expert, Kuo Sina, that the structure is intact and capable of absorbing more water than it is currently exposed to. Its capacity should be sufficient to cope with millennial water reaching a height of 175 meters and a speed of 70,000 km3/s.
Currently, the water level reaches 147 meters. According to the Chinese state television CNTV, it is two meters above the border, which prevents floods. According to list In addition, the Global Times has a dam system that would report any suspicions in advance.
However, the way in which the state of the dam is informed by the local media is gradually changing. At first she wrote that the building could cope with a ten-thousand-year flood, and then reduced this limit to a thousand-year-old and then a hundred-year-old water.
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The RFA points out that the Chinese media and authorities report floods only to a limited extent. As an example, they cite the aforementioned evacuation of four thousand people, who were mentioned in the local newspapers, but only marginally. The main pages of the press did not fill the reports either.
Without the Internet, where videos and photos from the affected areas are disseminated, the general public might not even know about the floods. Therefore, most of the information from the affected sites comes from the residents themselves, who placed it on the Internet. Their videos show sunken cars on the streets, flooded areas in lower positions or water flowing from canals.
The RFA also warns against deliberate concealment of the entire disaster, as police in Chongqing City on the Yangtze River have warned that anyone who spreads “alarm” messages on a publicly available computer network will be arrested immediately.
“Some users tried to show what was really going on, but they were silenced and the authorities in Chongqing withheld the news,” one city resident said. “They see people trying to bring information about what’s really going on as criminals. I think that’s awful,” she complained.
That such things happen was also confirmed on Twitter by a French24 reporter in China, who had an interview with Chinese geologist Fan Siaom about the impact of the hydropower plant on the environment. Although their conversation was not to revolve around the floods, Siaom was still pressured not to say anything to foreign journalists.
As soon as the French team went to the dam, they came under the control of plainclothes police, who prevented them from interviewing anyone.
“By not letting information go, they hide their own incompetence. At the same time, such a great misfortune often requires the government to take reasonable steps,” lawyer Sung Jiansheng explained the reasons for the government’s action.
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