Thousands of tonnes of rubbish washed down by recent torrential rain are threatening to jam the locks of China’s massive Three Gorges dam and is in places so thick that people can stand on it. Chen Lei, a senior official at the China Three Gorges Corporation said that 3,000 tonnes of rubbish was being collected at the dam everyday, but there were still not enough resources to clean it all up. “The large amount of waste in the dam area could jam the mitre gate of the dam,” said referring to the gates of the locks which allows shipping to pass through the Yangtze river. The river is a crucial commercial artery for Chingqing and other areas in China’s less-developed western interior provinces.

Some 50,000 square meters of the water’s surface had been covered by debris washed down since the start of the rainy season in July. The rubbish is around 60cm deep and in some part  so compact that people can walk on it. The three Gorges dam is the world’s largest hydro power project and was built partly to tame the flooding along the Yangtze which filled over 4,000 people in 1998. The dam has cost over £24 billion and forced relocation of 1.3 million people to make way for the reservoir. Towns, fields and historical and archaeological sites has been submerged. Environmentalist have warned for years that the reservoir could turn into a cesspool of raw sewage and industrial chemicals backing on to Chongquing city, fearing that silt trapped behind the dam could cause erosion downstream.

-The Guardian