By the second half of the 20th century, humans were captivated by the idea of taming nature, making their mark on the world with colossal concrete structures. They’d gone absolutely - sorry about this - dam mad. 

 

From democrats to dictators, the latest craze for politicians around the globe was to build dams. And for good reason! Dams are used to produce hydroelectricity, provide irrigation, protect against floods and give more work for more citizens. What could be bad about a dam?

 

Well, many many things. 

 

Yes, dams are great. But they’re also vast potential weapons of mass destruction - and they’re sitting right above our cities all around the world. 

 

Chairman Mao, the leader of the Chinese Community Party, was one who hopped on the dam bandwagon. He decided to focus his dam efforts on the Huai River, which was particularly subject to flooding, and build the Banqiao Dam. But from word go, there were some problems. 

 

The vice premier at the time said that worrying about flooding was counter-revolutionary and reactionary. Flood protection was for wusses. Instead, they wanted to focus efforts on harnessing the POWER of the water for irrigation and hydroelectricity. 

 

During the construction of the dam, one brave hydrologist named Chen Xing dared to speak up about the fact that the dam didn’t have enough sluice gates installed. Kinda a problem in the event of a flood. But he was labelled a right-wing opportunist and fired. Or sent to a labour camp for reeducation. The waters are murky on that detail.

 

Around the same time, the Chinese government was also chopping down forests all over the place to make way for steel manufacturing. And as we know, deforestation equals changes in weather patterns and more extreme flooding. Sigh.

 

But despite the warning signs, the dam was built in the early 1950s. It was declared to be an iron dam that could not be broken. Strong enough to withstand a one in 1000 year flood event (a storm that would unleash about 0.5 meters of rain over 3 days).  

 

And then, in August 1975, along came Typhoon Nina, creating a monstrous weather pattern that dumped three times as much water as that dreaded 1000-year event.

 

In a few days, Banqiao dam was at capacity. So they opened up the sluice gates. Oh damn, they were too cheap and didn’t listen to Chen Xing so there weren’t enough of them. The water kept rising. Next idea - sandbags? 

 

Despite the army’s efforts to control the water (yes, they tried sandbags on top of the dam wall), the dam was soon pulverised by hundreds of billions of litres of water. Disaster struck. An inland tsunami 10 metres high and 11 kilometres wide travelled down into the valley at 50 km/h, wiping out the 9,600 citizens in the town of Daowencheng.

 

Everything and everyone in its way was destroyed. Famine, infections and epidemics followed in the horrendous aftermath. It’s estimated that the Banqiao dam collapse killed up to 250,000 people.

 

But here’s the thing - this all happened during a time when the Communist Party of China had a lot of control over the media... And they didn’t want anyone to know about their dodgy dam. 

 

So how long before the world knew the truth about what really happened that day? 

 

Surely nobody would deliberately collapse a dam. Would they?

 

PREVIOUS EPISODES MENTIONED:

• The Potato Blight (There Is No Such Thing As A Natural Disaster)

 

SOURCES:

• 230,000 Died In A Dam Collapse That China Kept Secret For Years in Ozy
• Reflections on Banqiao by Fiona Macleod 
• The Catastrophic Dam Failures in China in August 1975 by Thayer Watkins 
• The Fatal Engineering Flaws Behind the Deadliest Dam Failure in History in Popular Mechanics 
• The Largest Act of Environmental Warfare in History by Steven I Dutch 
• Typhoon Nina–Banqiao dam failure, in Britannica

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