Hua-wei Zhou, a Geosciences professor from Texas Tech University who was going to use 60 seismometers to track mini-quakes at the Three Gorges reservoir, 250 miles east of the Sichuan earthquake epicenter, is now using the devices to study the safety of the dam.
According to him and his team, the tragedy scenario could have been far worse if the dam would have collapsed. The city of Chengdu, with a population of 4 million, is just 60 miles away, and the whole town would have been flooded. More than that, more than 75 million people live downstream of the dam, and the floodplain from the Yangtze River provides food for most of China’s residents.
After all, some could look at the bright side of this tragedy: if the dam wouldn’t have resisted the earthquake, we could have witnessed one of the biggest disasters in history. Personally, I know a few persons from China, and I can tell that the Chinese are among the gentlest people in the world and I’m glad that the other 75 million of them are still alive.
