12. Yet Another Bad Maoist Idea: Poorly Planned Dams
The toxic fruits of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward continued to inflict misery upon the Chinese for many years, long after it was wrapped up. While the program was still a going concern, the Maoist government had what was on its face a good idea: build a series of dams, with the goal of retaining water, and providing hydroelectricity. They were built with the help of Soviet experts, but in what turned out to be a bad idea, costs and time were cut by cutting corners on safety – especially flood control safety.
A chief engineer blew the whistle on the danger, but he was ignored, accused of lacking communist zeal, and banished to the back of beyond. One of those dams was constructed at Banqiao, on the Ru River in Henan. It stood 387-feet-high and had a storage capacity of 17.4 billion cubic feet. The dam was rated to withstand “a thousand-year flood”, that is it was deemed safe against any flood other than one so severe that odds were that it would happen only once in a millennium. As seen below, it took considerably less than a millennium for such a flood to arrive.
