FW: Openness, transparency. technocrats, and burocrats

["Dukelow, James S Jr" <jim.dukelow@PNL.GOV>]

A message I sent to RISKANAL a few months ago has some relevance to the current RADSAFE discussion of dam safety.



Best regards.



Jim Dukelow

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Richland, WA

jim.dukelow@pnl.gov



-----Original Message-----

From: Dukelow, James S Jr 

Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2003 11:07 PM

To: riskanal@lyris.pnl.gov

Subject: Openness, transparency. technocrats, and burocrats







I have been reading an interesting book, _River Town_, written by Peter Hessler, who spent two years in the mid-90s as a Peace Corpsman teaching English Literature at Fuling Teachers College in Fuling, Sichuan, a city of about 200,000 at the confluence of the Wu River with the Yangtze River.



On pages 115-116 I ran into the paragraph, in the context of a discussion of the Three Gorges Dam project:



"But there is also the history of Henan province, where heavy rains in 1975 caused 62 modern dams to fall like dominoes, one after another, and 230,000 people died.  Although the scale of that particular disaster was unique, the poor engineering is less unusual: 3,200 Chinese dams have burst since 1949.  In this century, the failure rate of Chinese dams is 3.7 percent, compared to 0.6 percent in the rest of the world."



The raised my eyebrows, since I had written a paper in the mid-90s that had me reviewing the history of dam failures, and I had not run into these.



Doing the obvious, I Googled "Henan 1975 dam failure".  That turned up a few dozen hits, a couple of which were pretty interesting.  Thayer Watkins of the San Jose State University Economics Department has a white paper, "The Catastrophic Dam Failures in China in August 1975", available at <www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/aug1975.htm>.



The reason I hadn't heard of these dam failures is that the Chinese government had suppressed the story for twenty years, until Human Rights Watch/Asia blew the whistle on them in a contra-Three-Gorges white paper published in 1995.  The dam failures were the result of a typhoon that came further inland than usual, and dumped a meter of rain in three days in Henan province.  The Banqiao Dam on the Ru River and the Shimantan Dam on the Hong River, both tributaries of the Huang He (Yellow River) system, were both designed for an approximately 0.5 meter three day rainfall -- purportedly 500- and 1000-year floods.  The failure of these dams released 600,000,000 cubic meters of water in a few hours.  85,000 died in the flooding and another 145,000 died in epidemics and famine in the aftermath of the flooding.



The other 60 dams either failed independently because of the beyond design basis flood or as a consequence of the failure of Banqiao and Shimantan.



Watkins writes:



"The Vice Premier also asserted that primacy should be given to water accumulation for irrigation.  A hydrologist named Chen Xing objected to this policy on the basis that it would lead to water logging and alkalinization of farm land due to a high water table produced by the dams.  Not only were the warnings of Chen Xing ignored but political officials changed his design for the largest reservoir on the plains.  Chen Xing, on the basis of his expertise as a hydrologist, recommended twelve sluice gates but this was reduced to five by critics who said Chen was being too conservative.  Chen Xing was sent to Xinyang."



"When problems with the water system developed in 1961 a new Party official in Henan brought Chen Xing back to help solve the problems.  But Chen Xing criticized elements of the Great Leap Forward and was purged as a "right-wing opportunist."



All of this excites several resonances.



A few years ago, Sheila Jasanoff had a one-page op-ed in Nature that argued that the root cause of several technological disasters was that ordinary people (read non-engineers, non-scientists) had been frozen out of the design/operations decision making process.  This set me off on an extended RISKANAL rant, because the examples she used were all cases in which the technical input had been diluted/subverted/sabotaged/contravened by management and politicians with other agenda, rather like what seems to have happened with the Henan dams.



To this day, noone outside China knows for sure how many people died in the great Tangshan earthquake of 1976, because of a similar cover-up.  Estimates range between the official 240,000 and 750,000.



Although one can argue that the Henan and Tangshan cover-ups didn't harm anyone, that is clearly not the case with the Chinese government's SARS cover-up, which has probably destroyed the opportunity to eradicate the epidemic when it was just a few cases in Guangdong, using the isolation and infection control techniques that appear to have worked in Vietnam and perhaps a few other places.



Best regards.



Jim Dukelow

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Richland, WA

jim.dukelow@pnl.gov



These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.



 

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