Garbage islands threaten China's Three Gorges dam

[Scurrilous]

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"Thousands of tons of garbage washed down by recent torrential rain are threatening to jam the locks of China's massive Three Gorges Dam, and is in places so thick people can stand on it, state media said on Monday.

Chen Lei, a senior official at the China Three Gorges Corporation, told the China Daily that 3,000 tons of rubbish was being collected at the dam every day, but there was still not enough manpower to clean it all up.

"The large amount of waste in the dam area could jam the miter gate of the Three Gorges Dam," Chen said, referring to the gates of the locks which allow shipping to pass through the Yangtze River.

The river is a crucial commercial artery for the upstream city of Chongqing and other areas in China's less-developed western interior provinces.

Pictures showed a huge swathe of the waters by the dam crammed full of debris, with cranes brought in to fish out a tangled mess, including shoes, bottles, branches and Styrofoam."


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100802/wl_nm/us_china_threegorges

[Stinky The Clown]

1. Sad. That country is so environmentally threatened, its incredible.

Their government is in a devil's pact with western corporations to maximize output, consequences be damned.

We only have one planet. And this is how we treat it.

[HereSince1628]

2. When I visited the river back a few years and the water was rising

I wondered about all the crap washing into the river. The dam is first world technology in a place with industrial revolution ethics.

[jwirr]

3. I seem to remember in the 70s when Americans were first allowed

to visit talk about how neat and clean their streets were. Things must have changed a bit.