Zipingpu Dam May Have Triggered the Sichuan Quake 193
bfwebster writes "An article in the Telegraph (UK) raises an interesting question: was the massive (7.9) Sichuan earthquake that wracked China last year and left millions homeless caused by ground stresses following the completion of the Zipingpu dam? As the article notes, 'The 511-ft-high Zipingpu dam holds 315 million tonnes of water and lies just 550 yards from the fault line, and three miles from the epicenter, of the Sichuan earthquake. Now scientists in China and the United States believe the weight of water, and the effect of it penetrating into the rock, could have affected the pressure on the fault line underneath, possibly unleashing a chain of ruptures that led to the quake.'" The Sichuan region is earthquake-prone, but has not seen anything as large as the 7.9-magnitude quake for perhaps millions of years. The Chinese government denies any connection between the dam and the earthquake and seems to be actively obstructing the access of scientists who want to investigate. The article concludes, "There is a history of earthquakes triggered by dams, including several caused by the construction of the Hoover Dam in the US, but none of such a magnitude."
Re:Tragic, maybe? (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel a bad movie based on this where need to blo (Score:4, Insightful)
I feel a bad movie based on this where need to blow up dam to stop a super quake from happening is coming.
Re:Social justice requires desalination (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the country that strictly enforces a one-child-per-family law, and you think the Chinese government actually wants more people to take care of?
Re:Tragic, maybe? (Score:3, Insightful)
I choose later. Preferrably after I'm dead.
Tell that to your grandchildren.
Re:Social justice requires desalination (Score:5, Insightful)
Every natural disaster has a disproportionate effect on the poor! That's just one of the many, many reasons why it sucks to be poor!
Re:It would have likely occurred anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
It could indeed have helped. There was a proposal a few years ago to inject water into faults, the idea being that this would lubricate the faults and trigger quakes sooner. That, of course, means more smaller quakes, rather than fewer really big ones.
Probably never came to anything due to liability concerns. Letting nature kill a few thousand is better than a human doing something that kills one who has a good lawyer. Woot. Unless it's burning fossil fuels, I suppose... never mind...
Re:Social justice requires desalination (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Social justice requires desalination (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry folks.
They would have been better off if they hadn't elected the idiot Mayor and Governor.
People like to blame FEMA but FEMA did they typical job. The local and state governments where criminal.
It was the local government that failed to use the school buses to evacuate the people. Heck they even left them in the flood plane. My city has been hit by three storms. The School buses are always moved to stageing areas near shelters. The state government put police out side New Orleans to keep the people IN after the storm.
Heck the state didn't even have shelters for all the people. Texas had to provide shelters.
What really ticks me off is people forget about Mississippi. They took the worst hit for Katrina. They had a HUGE store surge that took out whole sections of their coast line. They had many homes whipped out but you don't see people up in arms because their state and local governments where a lot more effective.
What is the worst part. That idiot moron of a mayor GOT REELECTED!!!!!!!!!!!
Re:Social justice requires desalination (Score:4, Insightful)
"This earthquake killed a lot of people and ruined the lives of countless others. That effect was disproportionate on the poor."
Chinese poor have always been expendable. They are easily replaced, and their rulers have always understood this.
Re:Prediction (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in the 40s and 50s Americans also used to just sigh and call it the "Price of progress." There used to be widespread acceptance of infrastructure development. Attitudes started changing in the 60's and 70's. It's a lot easier to be against infrastructure development when you live in a nation with well developed infrastructure.
Re:Social justice requires desalination (Score:5, Insightful)
And, bringing it around full circle, electing terrible leadership is a consequence of being poor and uneducated. The people re-electing the mayor bought the line that the federal government was primarily responsible for the mishandling, and probably made a Bush joke or two... not understanding what role the state and federal governments were supposed to play.
The feds should be thanked for cleaning up the mess Louisiana got itself into.
Re:It would have likely occurred anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
+5?
Geez. For that matter, as long as we're speculating, it could have made the quake much less intense.
Remember, kids: Just because you've changed something, doesn't mean that you've always made something else worse.
Re:It would have likely occurred anyway (Score:1, Insightful)
LOL, except common sense basic physics has taught all of us that if you put a shit ton of pressure on something, it's likely to break.
This concept is far more plausable than you trying to refute it the other way. I don't have to put a fucking 20 ton bolder on top of my car to speculate it'll crush it, while you'd simply claim it *COULD* make the car expand instead! Because no one actually studied it! RTFS, it's already been stated this phenomenon has been recorded and researched in other areas making the speculation a pretty good hypothesis.
True? No one ones, but there's certainly no support that it dampened the impact.
Re:How do they know it's never happened before? (Score:2, Insightful)
That earthquake detector was only for determining the direction of the quake, it could not measure the strength. And has it ever been determine if it even worked properly? I'm sure it was fine at detecting shaking that it had been shaked, but it seems to me that the direction wouldn't be very reliable.
Re:Social justice requires desalination (Score:5, Insightful)
Dams don't prevent flooding. They just move it somewhere else.
Right, and we know exactly where that somewhere else is (right behind the dam) and we don't build houses there anymore because it's a lake.
Dams prevent catastrophic, uncontrolled flooding by buffering the surge in a lake and letting it out slowly. The Ohio River no longer floods because of the hundreds of artificial lakes created in its watershed, for instance.
Re:It would have likely occurred anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting you should mention fossil fuels as there's a strong correlation between earthquakes and oil extraction (and other mining activities)..
Metric (Score:2, Insightful)
The 511-ft-high Zipingpu dam holds 315 million tonnes of water and lies just 550 yards from the fault line
China (and by the way the rest of the world except USA, Burma and Liberia) uses the metric system. Your numbers sound like chinese to me and most of the world population.
Re:It would have likely occurred anyway (Score:1, Insightful)
Have you read the lawsuit? The main point was the coffee was *way* hotter than is typical. If you spill hot coffee on your legs normally, you don't need skin grafts. Not all values of "hot" are the same: If every restaurant served coffee at this temperature we'd see horrible accidents every day.
Furthermore, it's easy to imagine ways to spill coffee in a car that are no one's fault. A temperature that causes serious damage in a spill is clearly inappropriate for a drive-through.
The second point of the suit is that the company had been warned but decided that it was worth paying the occasional small damages. That's the whole point of punitive damages: to get the company's attention.
And you're exactly on target with the idea of precedent. If McDonald's serves a burger with cheese way hotter than a reasonable person would expect, hot enough to cause 3rd-degree burns, why yes, they *should* pay up.