Damn!

I am in Yichang, with a boat ticket for an 11 a.m. departure up the
river, waiting for a bus that will take me to the Three Gorges Dam
(known locally as "sanxia daba," or "sanxia big dam"), five times the
size of the Hoover Dam, and one of the major milestones of this trip.

This dam will forever change the Yangtze, especially the scenic and
historic Three Gorges area, displacing nearly 2 million people,
submerging 8,000 archaeological sites and stopping the river's flow for
480 km.

My guidebook tells me that if the dam breaks after the reservoir
behind it is full (sometime between 2009 and 2011), the 4 million
inhabitants of Yichang are predicted to be dead in an hour in a
horrific rush of water. More alarming still: two large dams did fail
in the Henan province in 1975, killing 230,000 people. That event
remained a state secret until recently. A few years ago, a hundred or
so cracks were discovered on the downstream face of the big dam.
Opinions diverge on what they represented: just a glitch in
construction, which has since been remedied, or a portent of things to
come.

As I look around at the people of Yichang, and attempt to gauge their
opinions about the dam, it seems most are in favor (that is, if they
understand my question). I hope Yichang, its people and its
environment can thrive in the lee of this mammoth engineering project,
but it is hard not to be skeptical.