Sanmenxia Dam

The Sanmenxia Dam on the Yellow River ( Huang He) in the East of Henan Province in China is the storage space, the largest dam in East and Southeast Asia, and the first dam built on the Yellow River.

History

The 108 meter high gravity dam was built from April 1957 to September 1960 with Soviet advice in Sanmenxia City and was regarded as a great achievement of revolutionary China. You should protect against floods, obtained from hydro-power and used for irrigation. She was also among the prestigious major projects of the Great Leap Forward, even if the planning began even before the start of this campaign. The project had been criticized, among others by the trained engineer in the U.S. and hydrologists Huang Wanli, who pointed out that the Yellow River would fill the storage space very quickly with sediment. Mao Zedong himself took in a published in June 1957 editorial in Renmin Ribao Huang Wanli personally and accused him of the party damage, the promotion of bourgeois democracy and admiration of foreign cultures.

About the size of the original storage space, there are very different information. The sources speak of 5.89, but also of 35.4 and even 96 km ³ ( billion cubic meters ). The most credible figure is the average ( 35.4 ). In the original plans, a maximum water level of 360 m above sea level, a storage capacity of 64.7 billion cubic meters, an installed electrical capacity of 1160 MW and resettlement of 870,000 people said to have been planned.

The storage space is now filled to a considerable extent with sediment because of the mud of the Yellow River is deposited in large quantities. Prior Wanli had been warned by Huang. It was ignored in the planning, however, and initially no openings in the dam to flush the lake were present. 1964, the storage space already to a large extent (about 60% ) was silted up. Every year he was filled with a further 10 billion cubic meters. At times, the dam had less than 10 % of the original storage space. The sediments also hinder the generation of turbines in the hydroelectric power plant because they are clogged.

Today we encounter this problem with rinses in the rainy season at a lower water level. In this way it is possible that in. borne sediments pass and flush out even deposited sediments again. In several phases of additional openings were installed at different heights in the dam, the first in 1968, another to 1978. Nowadays is from November to June, when no high water, mud and water and stored in the flood season from July to October, the water level by 16 m lowered and flushed the reservoir.

The reservoir is between 400 m and 5800 m wide.