Part 8 – Three Gorges Dam

Date: 4/4/2017 & 4/5/2017

No trip to China to see great engineering works would be complete without a visit to the Three Gorges Dam near Yichang in East Central China. It is the largest powerhouse in the world based on installed generating capacity — a part of China’s push to depend less on coal for power production.

Our visit plan was fine, but the weather turned this piece of the trip into a disaster.

The city of Yichang is a little off the beaten tourism track … here is a little anecdote to illustrate this. We arrived at our Yichang Ramada Hotel around 11 a.m., arranged for a tour of Three Gorges Dam the next day, settled into our room, then went down to the restaurant on the 4th floor to get some lunch. There was not a soul around and the lights were out.

Photo 2859, Cheryl in our Yichang hotel’s deserted restaurant

We walked back through the foyer area to see if we could find anyone, and a lady came walking by. “Is the restaurant open?”, I asked. She obviously spoke no English. We pointed to the dining room, and she answered by going into the restaurant, turning on the lights, and pointed to a table. Okay I guess they ARE open. 45 minutes later, with the restaurant deserted except for us, we had our club sandwiches … excellent if not exactly speedy. No matter, we were not in a hurry. I asked if they had Sprite. The waitress gave me a puzzled look, so we put our new phone app “Google Translate” to work. At the top I typed in “do you have Sprite?”, and some Chinese characters came out at the bottom. “Ahhh”, she said, and a Sprite immediately appeared on the table.

Another thing about this town: people laid on their car horns non-stop as they drove — as if everyone was mad at the world. That’s just what they do … nothing personal, no hurled insults. Remember the old movies in the 1940’s when they would add the sound of horns blaring in the background to suggest the atmosphere of being in a big city? Well, there was plenty of atmosphere in Yichang.

Late in the afternoon before dinner, we went for a walk down the main street of Yichang to the Yangtze River waterfront where there was a very nice waterfront park. Along the main arterial was a nice street feature, an X-shaped pedestrian overpass to eliminate vehicle-pedestrian conflicts at key arterials. You know what it’s like when you are driving downtown and want to turn right, but everyone has to wait for the signal to stop the pedestrians so you can turn? With these overpasses, the pedestrians can go to any corner of an intersection without waiting, and cars can make turns without having to wait for pedestrians. Great idea.

Photo 0300, X-pedestrian overpass in downtown Yichang

We hung out at the riverfront park on the Yangtze in Yichang for a while getting photos and watching people, then returned to the hotel for dinner.

Photo 0315, Yichang riverfront promenade, cable-stayed bridge beyond

Photo 2875, old ways persist, a vegetable hawker with pedal-powered cart

The next day we went downstairs at 1 p.m. for our tour of Three Gorges Dam as scheduled. But they informed us that the tour would be from 2 pm to 6 pm, not starting at 1 pm. The trouble was that we had to leave Yichang at 6 pm to catch our flight to Guangzhou, so getting back from the tour at 6 p.m. was too late. A couple of lady clerks took this problem as a serious personal challenge and threw themselves into solving it with gusto … and about 45 minutes later, there was a nice new beautifully appointed VW sedan … along with our personal driver who would drive us to the dam. We could see what we wanted to see, then come back to Yichang early enough to catch our plane. Really sweet gals.

Just about the time we left for the dam, it started to rain. During the hour-long drive to Three Gorges it kept getting worse and worse. By the time we got to the project it was completely socked in with fog with a heavy downpour. The tour system they have is to get on a tour bus that takes you to an observation station, and when you are done you catch another bus to the next station. At the top, the fog was so thick you could barely see 100 feet, and the dam was nowhere in sight. The rain was coming down in buckets, and to top it off, there were some thunderclaps. One of the attendants suggested we got off this high point, which did not require much persuasion. After a previous scary experience we had with a thunderstorm on Mt. Whitney years ago, we never fool around with thunderstorms any more, and we got the heck down from there!

Photo 2946, our great view of Three Gorges Dam

We came to a section of the tour where the locks were visible in the fog, and got a clue which way was downstream by the direction of the descending locks, and if not for that it would have been hard to tell which way the river flowed. We came to a another section of what looked like it might have been the dam, but it disappeared into the fog so you couldn’t tell for sure.

This was getting nowhere. Enough already! We got on the next shuttle bus, and decided to just stay on it to get back to the tour center, skipping all the remaining tour stops. There was no other way to get back! At the following shuttle bus stop after we got on, a group of shouting, crowding Chinese mobbed their way onto the bus shouting at each and pushing and shoving each other in the struggle to get seats on the bus. Fortunately, we had moved to the front of the bus before this mob got aboard, so it was a spectator sport for us! Some of the other Chinese, like us, were shaking their heads at this rude behavior.

The drive back to Yichang was slower than the drive to the dam because we were returning to town in rush-hour traffic. I was starting to worry about cutting it too close for catching our flight to Guangzhou, but I needn’t have worried. With all the bad weather, when we arrived at the airport, the flight showed as “delayed” on the departure board soon after we arrived, and stayed that way all evening until around 11 o’clock at night, at which time the flight was CANCELLED. So there we were at 11 p.m. an hour’s drive from Yichang with no place to stay. And to add insult to injury, we had to buy another plane ticket to replace the flight that was cancelled to have any chance of catching our flight the next day to Kuala Lumpur to keep from losing a day on our schedule. (Amazingly, we did get a reimbursement from the Chinese airline to reimburse us for the extra flight.

Standing there in the airport, a fellow came up to us who spoke passable English, and said he would take care of us. He didn’t tell us what he had in mind, where we would be going or how we would get there, and he was very insistent. We decided that we didn’t like the look of that, and left this guy and went back to the airline counter, and he followed us there. A little creepy. We later learned that he worked for the airline, but he said nothing to identify himself.

We finally found a manager at the airline counter who told us there was a shuttle bus going to a town nearby where the airline would put us up for free. (Beware of anything for free!) It was getting close to midnight, and we had no place to stay so we decided to go for this one. The hotel turned out to be decidedly downscale … a place for working class Chinese that looked like it had not received a thorough cleaning in years. But the bedding was clean and there were no cockroaches, so we hit the rack and called it a day, happy to at least have a place to sleep! By the stares we got the next morning at breakfast it looked like they had never seen a Westerner.

What an exhausting disaster! So after all this I can report to you that we did go to the Three Gorges Dam, but I cannot report that we actually SAW it! We decided we would check it off our list and call it good.

Photo 2941-2, what Three Gorges Dam would look like on better day than we had
Source:  pages.vassar.edu

Here are a few Three Gorges Dam statistics for the technophiles:

*    World’s largest power station, 22,500 megawatts installed generating capacity
*    Generating units: 32 – 700 megawatt units (wow!)
*    Construction: 1994-2003
*    Height: 594′ above bedrock. (264′-371′ net head: the difference between reservoir & tailrace elevations)
*    Crest length: 7,661′ (1.45 miles)
*    Annual power generation (2014): 98.8 Terawatt-hours (Twh)
*    Increased shipping capacity on the Yangtze River
*    Reduced the potential for floods downstream
*    Controversy: flooded archeological and cultural sites, and displaced some 1.3 million people.

For perspective, here are corresponding stat’s for our own Grand Coulee Dam, the largest powerhouse in the U.S.:

*    Installed capacity: 6809 megawatts
*    Generating units: 18 @ 125 megawatts, 3 @ 600 MW, 3 @ 805 MW
*    Construction: 1933-1942
*    Height above bedrock: 550′ (380′ net head)
*    Crest length: 5,223′ (0.99 mi)
*    Annual power generation: 20.24 Twh

Frankly, I’m surprised that the physical dimensions are quite close to each other. So what accounts for annual generation being 5 times as great at Three Gorges as at Grand Coulee? It’s the difference in flow volumes between the Yangtze and the Columbia – the average flow of the Yangtze approximately 4 times the average flow for the Columbia.]

Epilogue: we made our flight the next morning from Yichang to Guangzhou. We missed our reserved night at the hotel at Guangzhou airport (sorry, no refund!), but did catch a flight later that day to Kuala Lumpur, getting us to KL on the day planned, ending the nightmare.