This Dam’s Breach Led to a Damn Disaster
Water crested a foot above the Banqiao dam’s wave protection wall in the early hours of August 8th, and it collapsed. It was one of 62 dams that collapsed because of Typhoon Nina – a disaster that released nearly 16 billion cubic meters of water. The result was a wave 6.2 miles wide and 10 – 23 feet high, that rushed downstream at 31 miles an hour. It left a swath of devastation 34 miles long and 9.3 miles wide. The Banqiao dam disaster was history’s deadliest structural failure. It unleashed the third deadliest flood ever, devastated 30 cities and counties, flooded million acres, and destroyed nearly 7 million houses.
The death toll might have been as high as 240,000, and all in all, more than 10 million people were impacted. The disaster took place at the tail end of Mao Zedong’s regime and his Cultural Revolution. The Chinese authorities did their best to hide the extent of the catastrophe. Solid information – or as solid as governmental information ever gets in China – did not emerge until the 1990s. The details were revealed for the first time when a former Minister of Water Resources described them in a preface for a book.
