Simon Denyer
The Washington Post
August 06, 2014
As the death toll from an earthquake in southwestern China rose to 589 on Wednesday, it has rekindled a debate about whether the country’s rush to build big dams is to blame for such calamities.
Search-and-rescue teams took advantage of drier weather Wednesday to push into the hard-hit mountain communities after the magnitude 6.1 quake, the country’s deadliest in four years, struck near the city of Zhaotong in Yunnan province.
But questions are once again being asked about China’s rush to build big dams in its southwestern mountains, especially in the wake of a number of smaller quakes since the water level was raised last year at the Xiluodu hydropower station, which lies about 100 miles north of the epicenter of Sunday’s quake.
“Why do earthquakes keep happening in that area?” Wang Yongchen of the environmental group Green Earth Volunteers wrote on his microblogging account. “We can’t afford not to ask the reason why.”
Large reservoirs are known to put pressure on Earth’s crust and can cause quakes, although the link is often hard to establish definitively. China’s dash for hydropower, linked to soaring energy needs, has been the subject of much criticism, especially because many of the dams are being built in regions of “high or very high seismic hazard.”
