From Michael Hope
I read with interest Peter Hadfield’s article on the Yangtze river (22 November, p 46), having returned in September from a cruise down the river from Chongqing to Shanghai, including a tour of the Three Gorges dam and journeying through the five ship locks.
An important function of the dam that was not mentioned is to control flooding, which is a major problem for the seasonal river of the Yangtze.
Millions of people live downstream of the dam, with many large, important cities like Wuhan, Nanjing and Shanghai situated adjacent to the river. Plenty of farm land and China’s most important industrial area are built beside the river.
The Yangtze has seen some terrible floods. In 1931 there were 145,000 deaths although some Western sources put it much higher, between 3.7 and 4 million.
Advertisement
Further flooding killed 33,000 in 1954 and in 1998, 15 million were made homeless and the economic loss was estimated at over £16 billion.
Ambleside, Cumbria, UK
