Word: dam
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...questions about whether this was a disaster waiting to happen and could have been avoided with the construction of better water management systems. The swampy state of Tabasco, where Villahermosa is situated, also suffered floods in 1999, prompting the federal government to award millions of dollars to strengthen the dam and pump system. That money has not been all accounted for. "Right now we have a crisis to resolve," Interior Secretary Francisco Ramirez Acuna responded to TIME when asked about that project. "Afterwards, we can analyze what was done right and what was done wrong...
...Simons Muirhead & Burton and a specialist in media law, says he can imagine a scenario in which a gag order might become untenable because websites, wherever they are based, "are becoming freely accessible by nearly everybody. There could be an issue of trying to put your thumb in the dam, but it hasn't quite got to that stage yet." In the case of the anonymous royal embroiled in the alleged blackmail plot, the dam has already been breached...
...particular, infrastructure is not and cannot be the panacea for all the country’s problems, a belief that the Chinese government has unfortunately espoused for much of the last decade. China’s last major infrastructural project—the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric power plant—was finished in May 2006. Designed to control flooding and provide electricity to three percent of the nation’s inhabitants, it has even been touted by Forbes as one of the modern wonders of the world...
...problems it solved, it created more. The construction of the dam led to over a million people being forced to relocate as well as the destruction of numerous ecosystems and cultural relics. (I might have boated along the Yangtze myself except that there was no longer anything to see along the river banks after the dam was built.) The daily operation of the dam has also generated enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, and not to mention the dam poses significant sedimentation risks in addition to being vulnerable to tectonic and seismic activity. The lessons that can be learned from...
...this point, it's highly unlikely that work will stop on the gigantic project; the dam is still on track to be completed by 2009. But with the current administration apparently at pains to seem more environmentally sensitive, it's possible that its worst effects can be dealt with. Lei, for one, thinks the government's new willingness to talk about the dam's problems means Beijing is trying hard to make the right call. "No one can guarantee the Three Gorges will be catastrophe-free," says Lei. But the chances are much greater that a catastrophe can be avoided...