Flights on the upper reaches of China’s Yangtze River forced authorities to evacuate more than 100,000 people on Tuesday, threatening a 1,200-year-old world heritage site.
Staff, police and volunteers used sandbags to try to protect the 71-meter (233ft) Leshan Giant Buddha, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in southwestern Sichuan province, as muddy floodwaters flooded the toes for the first time since 1949. went, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
Sichuan, through which the Yangtze River flows, on Tuesday drew its emergency response to the maximum level to deal with a new round of flowing rainfall.
The Yangtze Water Resources Commission, the government body that oversees the river, issued a red warning late Tuesday, saying that water at some monitoring stations would expect “guaranteed” levels of flood protection by more than 5 meters to be higher.
Water intrusion at the Three Gorges Project, a major hydroelectric facility designed in part to tame floods on the Yangtze, was expected to reach 74,000 cubic meters per second on Wednesday, the highest since it was built, the ministry said. Water Resources.
The project limits the amount of water flowing by storing it in its reservoir, which has been more than a month higher than its official warning level.
The facility was forced on Tuesday to increase water discharge volumes to ‘limit flood pressure’, the water ministry said.
Authorities have been slow to show that the cascade of giant dams and reservoirs built along the upper reaches of the Yangtze have protected the area from the worst of the floods this year, although critics say that they can make things worse.
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