The Three Gorges Dam appears to have held up through China’s lethal flooding this week, handling a peak flow of 70,000 cubic meters of water per second . But during the crisis, China’s Internet users kept posting—and censors kept deleting—a record of the ever-less impressive official line on the dam’s capabilities through the years.
Chinasmack.com
preserves some of the posts and comments
, which begin with the proposed dam being called “impenetrable” and able to withstand a “once in 10,000 year flood” in 2003, then work their way down through “1,000 year flood” and “100 year flood” till they reach this week’s admonition from the Yangtze Water Resources Commission that people “cannot place all hope” in the dam.
