Boom! Boom! Boom! A series of explosions blasted away a building in
the reservoir area of China's Three Gorges Project at 13:40 hours
Sunday, marking the start of the countdown to water storage and
power generation at the
Three Gorges
Project.
"This is the prelude to evacuation on a broader scale and the
countdown to water injection and power generation," said Gan
Yuping, deputy mayor of this western China metropolis and deputy
director of the Committee for the Construction of Three Gorges
Project Under the State Council.
Xue Fengsong, an explosives expert, said that all the debris will
be shipped to a designated place and buried deep underground.
Meanwhile, ancient bas-reliefs have been cut from a cliff at Qutang
Gorge, one of the Three Gorges, and transported to a safe site
about 600 meters downstream. This was the first batch of ancient
cultural relics to be moved from the construction site of the Three
Gorges Project, the largest of its kind in the world.
Not far from the same cliff, excavation of the ruins of a city of
the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279) is well under way. The city
wall of the Fengjie
County town, ancient tombs and typical ancient houses will also
be moved above the reservoir water line before the county is
submerged.
The relocation work drew journalists from dozens of local and
overseas media organizations, as well as a large crowd of
on-lookers.
The demolished building was that of the Yong'an Township
Government, which was built 20 years ago. It collapsed in a matter
of seconds. Soon afterwards, newly appointed county head Fei Wenbin
and his colleagues headed for their new office building, which is
1,000 sq. meters larger than the original one.
The Fengjie County Thermal Power Plant, which was also demolished
Sunday, had been closed for causing heavy pollution. Its 300
workers had been assigned new jobs and the retired workers receive
their pension once a month at the county social security bureau,
said the factory's old director Liu Keming.
Construction of the Three Gorges Project will inundate 632 sq km of
land. When the dam is completed in 2009, 1,100 villages will be
submerged. One third of the 1.03 million residents have already
moved to new homes in resettlement villages. Another 100,000 people
are expected to move out this year.
A
number of new cities for resettlers have been built on both sides
of the Yangtze River. At the new site of the Fengjie County seat,
three schools have already begun to recruit students. Two hospitals
and several department stores have opened there.
The largest-scale rescue of cultural relics in Chinese history has
entered a critical stage. In order to save the most important
cultural relics before the first-stage water storage of the Three
Gorges Dam starts in June 2003, archaeologists from across the
nation are working day and night at some 1,000 sites of cultural
relics.
"The resettlement towns will house as many vestiges of ancient
civilization as possible," said Shao Weidong, an official in charge
of the archaeological work at the Three Gorges.
(Xinhua News
Agency January 21, 2002)