Banqiao Dam
Coordinates: 32 ° 58 ′ 57 " N , 113 ° 37 ′ 29" E
The Banqiao Dam ( Chinese 板橋 水庫 大壩 / 板桥 水库 大坝 , Pinyin Bǎnqiáo shuǐkù dàbà ) is part of the same as the Shimantan Dam ( Chinese 石 漫灘 水庫 大壩 / 石 漫滩 水库 大坝 , Pinyin Shímàntān shukù) dàbà ) to the 62 dams in the administrative area of the prefecture -level city of Zhumadian in the central Chinese province of Henan , which failed catastrophically in 1975 during the exceptionally strong Typhoon Nina . About 26,000 (according to other sources up to 85,000) people died directly from the flood and another 145,000 (others estimate 86,000 and 230,000 respectively) from the subsequent epidemics and famine. The cascade rupture of these two dams is considered to be the most serious dam accident in human history.
Most of the dams that collapsed in this disaster were built with the help of experts from the Soviet Union or during the Chinese Great Leap Forward . In addition, the dam collapse occurred during the Chinese Cultural Revolution when most of the people were preoccupied with the "revolution". Information about the disaster was released in 2005 after being kept under lock and key by the Chinese government for decades. In May 2005, the Discovery Channel ( the Ultimate 10 Show ) ranked the disaster # 1 in The Ultimate 10 Technological Disasters prior to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster .
history
The Banqiao Dam was built in the 1950s during the "Great Leap Forward" on the Ru River ( 汝河 , a tributary of the Huai He ) as part of a flood retention project. It had a capacity of 492 million m³, with a reserve of 375 million m³ in order to avoid flooding. After completion, there were breaks in the dam and in the lock gate due to design and manufacturing errors. They were repaired with the help of Soviet engineers, and the new design, which was called The Iron Dam , was considered indestructible.
Chen Xing was one of China's leading hydrologists and helped design the dam. He was also a notable critic of the government's method of using many dams for a basin. He had proposed twelve lock gates for the Banqiao Dam, but they were reduced to five lock gates, and Chen Xing was criticized for being too conservative. Other dams in the project, including the Shimantan Dam, had similar reductions in safety and Chen was excluded from the project. After problems with the water system surfaced in 1961, he was called back to help. Chen continued to be an outspoken critic of the system and was again excluded from the project.
The Banqiao Flood
The dam was designed to withstand a flood that occurs "only once in a thousand years". In August 1975 there was a devastating flood due to an extraordinary typhoon. The lock gates could not withstand the excess water, partly also because of sedimentation deposits . In the early morning of August 8th, the smaller Shimantan Dam broke upstream. Half an hour later, at 1 a.m., the tidal wave hit the Banqiao Dam and it broke too. This caused the breakage of a total of 62 dams.
This rupture of the cascade produced a wave several meters high, which poured downstream into the lowlands at almost 50 km / h. Five districts of Zhumadians ( Suiping遂平县, Xiping西平县, Runan汝南 县, Pingyu平舆县, Xincai新蔡县), today's Yuanhui District 源汇区 of Luohe漯河 市City and Linquan临泉县 District of the city Fuyang in neighboring Anhui Province were flooded, as were thousands of square kilometers of land and countless villages, none of which had time to evacuate. The Beijing-Guangzhou Railway , a major artery, was cut, as were other major communications lines. Nine days later, over a million people were trapped in the water, inaccessible to disaster relief, while epidemics and famine decimated those trapped. Chen Xing was again called into the project and supported cleaning up the rivers.
The Chinese government tried to suppress information about the disaster. The first report on the details of the disaster was first published in 1995 by Human Rights Watch .
Many of these dams have been rebuilt, the Banqiao Dam in 1993.
Processing in the film
The accident was thematized in the 2011 Indo-Arab adventure film DAM999 - Water Knows No Mercy .
literature
- Judith Shapiro: Mao's War Against Nature - Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001, ISBN 0-521-78680-0 .
Web links
swell
- ↑ Shimantan Dam 33 ° 16 ′ 54 ″ N , 113 ° 33 ′ 21 ″ E
- ↑ a b Human Rights Watch report on dam construction in China with a detailed assessment of the Shimantam and Banqiao dam breaks. February 1995, accessed January 1, 2014 .
- ↑ St. Hirschberger, P. Burgherr, G. Spiekerman, E. Cazzoli, J. Vitazek, L. CHeng: "Comparative Assessment of Severe Accidents in the Chinese Energy Sector" (PDF; 1.6 MB), PSI report no. 03-04, Paul Scherer Institute, March 2003, ISSN 1019-0643 , page 73.
- ↑ The Forgotten Legacy of the Banqiao Dam Collapse. Retrieved July 11, 2020 .
- ↑ a b c 75 年 河南 水灾 ： 滔天 人祸 令 十万 人 葬身 鱼腹 _ 资讯 _ 凤凰网. Retrieved July 11, 2020 .
- ↑ a b 230,000 Died in a Dam Collapse That China Kept Secret for Years. February 17, 2019, accessed July 11, 2020 .
- ↑ People's Daily Online - After 30 years, secrets, lessons of China's worst dams burst accident surface. Retrieved July 11, 2020 .
- ^ Ecologists dread new dam boom - GlobalTimes. Retrieved July 11, 2020 .