[Marxism] Did Mega-Dam in China lead to earthquake?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, February 6, 2009
Possible Link Between Dam and China Quake
By SHARON LaFRANIERE

BEIJING — Nearly nine months after a devastating earthquake in Sichuan 
Province, China, left 80,000 people dead or missing, a growing number of 
American and Chinese scientists are suggesting that the calamity was 
triggered by a four-year-old reservoir built close to the earthquake’s 
geological fault line.

A Columbia University scientist who studied the quake has said that it 
may have been triggered by the weight of 320 million tons of water in 
the Zipingpu Reservoir less than a mile from a well-known major fault. 
His conclusions, presented to the American Geophysical Union in 
December, coincide with a new finding by Chinese geophysicists that the 
dam caused significant seismic changes before the earthquake.

Scientists emphasize that the link between the dam and the failure of 
the fault has not been conclusively proved, and that even if the dam 
acted as a trigger, it would only have hastened a quake that would have 
occurred at some point.

Nonetheless, any suggestion that a government project played a role in 
one of the biggest natural disasters in recent Chinese history is likely 
to be politically explosive.

The issue of government accountability and responsiveness has boiled 
over in China in the past year. The grieving parents of thousands of 
schoolchildren killed in the disaster have already made the 
7.9-magnitude earthquake a political issue, charging that children died 
needlessly in unsafe school buildings approved by negligent or corrupt 
officials.

More public anger erupted last year when the government failed to 
prevent the sale of tainted milk powder that sickened nearly 300,000 
children and killed six.

“Any kind of government-related disaster presently is very, very 
damaging and politically extremely sensitive,” said Cheng Li, the China 
research director at the Brookings Institution.

If it is proved that the earthquake “was related to a man-made situation 
and not just a natural disaster, the government will be very 
uncomfortable with that kind of report because of the whole issue of 
government accountability,” Mr. Li said.

Questions about the Zipingpu Dam are especially delicate because China 
is building many major hydroelectric dams in the southwest, a region 
which has abundant water resources but is considered prone to earthquakes.

In a petition to the government in July, a group of environmentalists 
and scholars said the fact that government scientists had underestimated 
the risk of the May earthquake raised questions about a host of other 
dams built in the same valley and along five other major rivers, 
according to an article published by Probe International, an 
environmental advocacy group. Chinese authorities have steadfastly 
dismissed any notion that reservoir-building in Sichuan Province placed 
citizens at any added risk, and they have blocked some Web sites of 
environmental groups that suggest that dangers have been overlooked.

In a December article in the Chinese magazine Science Times, two 
scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences strongly denied that the 
dam played any role in the earthquake. “The earthquake research 
community outside and inside China has widely accepted the notion that 
the May 12 Wenchuan earthquake was a huge natural disaster caused by 
massive crustal movement, because no reservoir triggered-quake with a 
magnitude eight has ever occurred in history,” said Pan Jiazheng, an 
expert in hydroengineering, according to a translation published by 
Probe International.

Scientists generally agree that a reservoir, no matter how big, cannot 
by itself cause an earthquake. But Leonardo Seeber, a senior scientist 
with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, said 
the impact of so much water could hasten an earthquake’s occurrence if 
geological conditions for a quake already existed. He said the best 
known example was a 1967 earthquake triggered by the Koyna Dam in a 
remote area of India, with a magnitude of about 6.5 and a death toll of 
about 180 people.

Mr. Seeber said that while the link between the Sichuan earthquake and 
the Zipingpu Dam was not yet proved, work by Christian Klose, a Columbia 
University researcher specializing in geophysical hazards, suggested the 
stress caused by the water’s weight might have hastened the quake by a 
few hundred years.

“It would have occurred anyway,” Mr. Seeber said. “But of course the 
people who were affected might think the timing is an important difference.”

Mr. Klose estimated that the weight of the water in the Zipingpu 
reservoir amounted to 25 times the natural stress that tectonic 
movements exert in a year. The added pressure, he wrote in an abstract 
to an unpublished study, “resulted in the Beichaun fault coming close to 
failure.”

Fifty stories tall and big enough to hold more than one billion cubic 
meters of water, the Zipingpu Dam astride the Minjiang River was billed 
as one of China’s biggest water control projects.

Officials said the $750 million project, part of a grand plan to develop 
regions in China’s south and west, would generate 760,000 kilowatts of 
electricity, irrigate more farmland, help control flooding and provide 
more water to industries and residents of nearby Chengdu, a city of more 
than 10 million.

Almost as soon as construction got under way in 2001, one expert, Li 
Youcai, voiced fears that officials were underplaying the risk of a 
major earthquake in the region, but government officials rejected his 
argument, according to an article published last year on China Dialogue, 
a Web site devoted to environmental news.

Officials allowed the reservoir to fill with water in late 2004. Fan 
Xiao, a chief engineer with the Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau, said 
that from late 2004 to late 2005, the data showed 730 minor earthquakes, 
with magnitudes of 3 or less.

When the major earthquake struck last May, it originated 3.4 miles from 
the reservoir. The rupture in the Earth’s crust stretched for 185 miles, 
initially moving in a direction that Mr. Klose said was consistent with 
the pressure from the water’s weight.

Mr. Fan, the chief engineer for the regional geology investigation team, 
told reporters soon afterward that he believed that the reservoir 
influenced the timing, magnitude and location of the earthquake.

“The main lesson is that in building these kinds of projects we need to 
give more consideration to scientific planning and not simply consider 
the electricity or water or the economic interests,” Mr. Fan said.

The debate reignited in December when two scientists with the China 
Earthquake Administration and three other researchers published a study 
in the Chinese journal Seismology and Geology. They concluded only that 
the weight of the reservoir’s water and diffusion of water from the 
reservoir below the Earth’s surface “clearly affected the local 
seismicity” over a period of nearly four years before the fault ruptured.

The Chinese researchers called for further study to see whether the 
reservoir helped trigger the earthquake. One of them, Du Fang, with the 
Sichuan Earthquake Administration, said Thursday that it was impossible 
to know whether the reservoir influenced the earthquake without more 
research. “The possibility exists,” she said.

Ms. Du said she and other scientists were free to research the issue 
fully. “We scientists are free to research the topic we proposed, as 
long as it is worth studying,” she said. “I don’t feel any restrictions 
on access to the data from the government.”

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