Tons of trash threatens Three Gorges Dam

Recent torrential rains have washed tons of trash down the Yangtze River threatening to jam the locks of the Three Gorges Dam.  In places the trash is so thick people can stand on it.  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 river is a crucial commercial artery for the upstream city of Chongqing and other areas in China's less-developed western interior provinces.

"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 Three Gorges Dam is the world's largest hydropower project, and was built partly to tame flooding along the Yangtze, which killed over 4,000 people in 1998 and countless more over the centuries.  Environmentalists have warned for years that the reservoir could turn into a cesspool of raw sewage and industrial chemicals backing onto nearby Chongqing city, and feared that silt trapped behind the dam could cause erosion downstream.

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