100-Meter Stretch Of Yangtze Riverbank Caves In - Warehouses, Construction Cranes Swept Into Water

[hatrack]

BEIJING - A 100-metre (330 ft) stretch of the Yangtze river's bank collapsed in eastern China on Saturday, sending some 10 warehouses and several cranes into the river, the official Xinhua news agency said on Sunday.

The landslide happened near the city of Wuhu in Anhui province, which lies roughly 100 km (60 miles) southwest of Nanjing, capital of the relatively prosperous province of Jiangsu on the eastern seaboard.

Wuhu lies hundreds of km (miles) downstream from the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydropower project, which officials have said would help control flooding in downstream areas.

Xinhua cited a local official as saying the collapse could have been caused by a vortex of water. It said others believed construction at a nearby shipyard might have loosened the foundations of a dyke and caused the collapse.

EDIT

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/45684/story.htm

[aquart]

1. Warehouses full of their stuff or ours?

[villager]

2. but surely there can no environmental limits to "economic miracles," can there?

Must be a kind of plot...

[phantom power]

3. I wonder if geologists are the most-ignored profession in the world?

[XemaSab]

4. Either most-ignored, or most under-consulted.

Possibly my favorite class lecture in school was the "What to look for when looking at a house" lecture in Geomorphology. :D

[Strelnikov_]

5. Or, the degradation from the dam altering the sediment balance

has already begun in earnest.

Deeper channel, higher banks relative to thalweg, more slope failures.