With a huge financial injection, China will soon begin a three-year program to keep its Three Gorges Project - the world's biggest undertaking of its kind - out of the clenches of geological hazards.
About three months ago, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji demanded the implementation of a 4-billion yuan (US$483.1 million) campaign to ensure the "absolute" safety of the project, located in one of the country's major zones for geological disasters.
A directing committee of the program, involving officials from several government departments - including the Ministry of Land and Resources and the Ministry of Finance - will be set up "soon," according to a source with the Ministry of Land and Resources, who wished to remain anonymous.
Moreover, an overall blueprint detailing the program will be available by the end of next month.
According to the source, money from a special fund founded for the construction of the hydropower project, will aid the program's treatment of landslides at the Yangtze River banks, as well as arranging precautionary and emergency measures against all possible geological disasters.
As central government is convinced treating geological hazards is essential to protecting local people's lives and properties - as is the Three Gorges Project itself, which provides the country with clean and cheap hydro energy in the new century - it is a crucial part of the whole project, said the source.
Hu Shanshun, another official with the Ministry of Land and Resources, said the ministry had laid a solid foundation for the implementation of the program, with rich first-hand materials accumulated from years of monitoring the area.
China has been striving to build a national geological hazards-prevention network by demanding all-level land and resource authorities to produce specific disaster prevention and relief plans of their own. The work was pushed through to the county level last year.
The areas along the Yangtze River formed one of the country's segment regions most susceptible to geological disasters.
As for the segment's dam area, a July report of the Yangtze River Water Resources Committee suggested there are 1,302 hazard-prone points.
Among them, the Yichang section of the river in Central China's Hubei Province has 202 points, spanning 23.1 square kilometers or 510 million cubic metres of earthwork.
Construction on the Three Gorges Project, located near Yichang in Central China's Hubei Province, began in 1993, with an estimated investment of 50.09 billion yuan (US$6.04 billion) upon completion in 2009.
(China Daily 08/27/2001)
