"We have to make concerted efforts to attain the dual goals of constructing a first-rate hydraulic project and making it into a top-level showcase for the environment," said Wang, "we will work harder to turn the Three Gorges Reservoir Area into an environmentally-friendly society."
The government has invested heavily in programs designed to restore and conserve the ecology of the Three Gorges area in recent years, including 12 billion yuan (about 1.5 billion U.S. dollars) spent on trying to harness geological disasters such as landslides. It has also closed or relocated 1,500 manufacturing ventures, constructed more than 70 sewage disposal and waste treatment plants and resettled about 70,000 people from disaster-prone areas.
Landslides are certainly apparent along the banks of the river, and the engineers / geologists really should have anticipated the loosely compact soil would be prone to failure. I'm not sure how any trained geoscientist could have missed this as a major, major impact. Going back to the proposed Tiger Leaping Gorge dam and reservoir...the government needs to be extremely careful there as the soil appear much more unstable, and the potential size of land failures much greater. Luckily so far none of the landslides have been large enough to cause wave-induced damage, although certainly some of the older landslides in the area would prove catastrophic should they happen today.
