China's super-dam is a disaster waiting to happen

 

China's super-dam is a disaster waiting to happen

By embarking on building a super-dam, the largest ever conceived, in the seismically active Sino-Indian border region, China is potentially creating a ticking water bomb for millions of people living downstream in India and Bangladesh, writes Brahma Chellaney.
 
The super-dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo River, better known as the Brahmaputra, is located in the eastern Himalayas, which sit on a geological fault line where the Indian Plate and the Eurasian Plate collide. If a powerful earthquake caused the super-dam to collapse, countless numbers of people downstream could die, largely in the Brahmaputra Valley of India's Assam state, where the river's immense width makes it look like an ocean in the monsoon season.
 
Yet there is little prospect of China halting work on the super-dam, Chellaney writes, saying that as long as the Chinese Communist Party remains in power, it will ignore the environmental and humanitarian consequences of its actions.