Three Gorges Reservoir Quickly Becoming World's Largest Cesspool

[hatrack]

WANZHOU, China - When this city decided to dam a tributary to the mighty Yangtze River, the city fathers searched for a suitable name for the beautiful artificial lake they said would form. They settled on Goddess Lake. They planned a tree-lined park along its shores, a tranquil respite from city life. Little boats would ply its waters. Six months after Goddess Lake began filling up, it's become a cesspool filled with pig blood, dead fish, raw sewage, dye and runoff from tanneries.

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Similar stories of environmental degradation are unfolding along the Yangtze upriver from the Three Gorges Dam. As the huge dam and smaller dams along the river's tributaries block the water, the flushing and self-cleaning action of the Yangtze River basin has slowed. Reservoirs are becoming sewers, filled with trash and smelly water. Local officials refuse to shut down polluting factories, fearful that unemployment will rise. Edicts from Beijing on controlling industrial waste go unheeded.

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Earlier this month, the State Environmental Protection Administration declared that pollution treatment projects along the Yangtze were "not as smooth as planned," the China Daily newspaper said. Local officials declined to close 206 of 304 small and medium-sized factories, including paper mills and distilleries, which the central government targeted as major polluters, a report by the agency said. In addition, 242 large factories, including steel and chemical plants, were told to improve their pollution control facilities. Of these, 227 haven't completed the work, it said. Industrial plants up the Zhuxi River include a pig slaughterhouse, a fruit juice cannery, textile industries and a dye factory, residents said. Numerous pipes pump sludge into the reservoir, which in turn funnels into the Yangtze through a flood-relief sluice.

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About a quarter of the 207 tributaries that flow into the Yangtze River are so seriously polluted that the water is unfit for irrigation, local press reports say. The Yangtze's water quality has also deteriorated. State officials say it's at grade three under a Chinese rating system, which means it's of poor quality but usable for various purposes. However, the state system doesn't include a count of coliform bacteria, a sign of raw sewage, which would drop the grade further. Some 30,000 ships and vessels operating in the Three Gorges Reservoir dump an estimated 7 million tons of excrement into the Yangtze every year. Moreover, cities keep dumping raw sewage into the river basin."

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http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/world/8532856.htm

[fryguy]

1. sounds like a page from *'s plan...

Fund the building of the plant, but not the operation of it. Sort of like having a Pentagon budget that doesn't include costs for military actions....

<snip>

"The central government has spent quite a lot of money for these water treatment plants, but didn't give money for their operation," said Zheng Zegen, an environmental engineering professor at Chongqing's Architecture University. So municipal governments and larger factories must pay to operate the new plants.

<snip>

[opihimoimoi]

2. They will learn soon enough. Pollution on this scale is raping Mother

Nature

[madrchsod]

3. some how i don`t feel sorry

for the chinese government or the people who run the factories. they are making billions off this misery.the people will suffer, that is a given, but the lure of the west`s greed of cheap goods will stop any true pollution controls. so the next time you buy some leather gloves think of the plants in china dumping black wastes in the water. we got rid of our glove making and tannier plants because of pollution controls and the high labor costs-isn`t capitalism grand?

[blindpig]

4. yup, globalization makes the world better

Say goodbye Chinese alligator, Yangtze dolphin.