Three Gorges Dam, China – With a $24 billion budget, 25,000 workers and 13 years of breakneck construction that displaced more than a million villagers, China has completed a giant and controversial dam across the mighty Yangtze River, seeking to tame the flood-prone waterway that has nurtured and tormented the Chinese people for 5,000 years.
It has the strength to hold back more water than Lake Superior and power 26 generators to churn out 85 billion kilowatt- hours of electricity a year when the final touches are completed in 2008. Hoover Dam, by comparison, generates more than 4 billion kilowatt-hours a year.
Engineers, many of whom have spent their entire careers on the site, have laid plans for the ceremonial pouring of a final slab of concrete Saturday to mark the moment: The dun-colored barrier at last has reached its full height of 606 feet and stretched a full 7,575 feet across the Yangtze’s murky green waters in the Three Gorges area of central China’s Hubei province 600 miles southwest of Beijing.
The Three Gorges Project, China’s most ambitious engineering undertaking since the Great Wall, has replaced Brazil’s Taipu Dam as the world’s largest hydroelectric and flood-control installation, Chinese officials said.
“This is the grandest project the Chinese people have undertaken in thousands of years,” said Li Yong’An, general manager of the government’s Three Gorges Co., which runs the project under the direct leadership of Premier Wen Jiabao.
In its scope and ambition – as well as its determination to push forward despite the human costs – the Three Gorges Project has become a symbol of China’s relentless energy and determination to take its place among the world’s great economic powers.
