CS to The Staircase Locks, Three Gorges Dam
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CS to The Staircase Locks, Three Gorges
Dam   This morning we had to be up, washed,
breakfasted, packed and down to the dining room by eight. That done all
passengers waited to be allocated a coach number for onward travel or tours. Our
luggage disappeared and we sat chatting at our table, ten minutes later we
joined – like so many ants – the queue to leave Century Sun. Above us we saw
trams and some people who preferred to walk
up.
  The trams looked like
more fun than walking so we queued and chatted to Lorraine and
Pete.
 Behind us, The Century Sun and the smaller, local boat that we had to
walk through.
 In the distance the Three Gorges Dam that we had hoped to ride down but
currently no tourist boats are permitted to do so. Our coach will take us to
visit the dam.
  At eight-thirty we were happily dangled as we stood on the tram. Loved the instruction about fighting......
  Complete pandemonium as people tried to
find buses with no obvious number, claim luggage and get settled. By half past
nine we were on our way, the first thing we saw was a scrap
yard. Not too far down the road we saw the other side of the dam.
 We followed the colossal structure as we went over a road
bridge.
 At the end of the bridge we saw one of the two sets of staircase locks. The Three Gorges Dam staircase locks takes annual
movement from ten million to one hundred million tonnes each year,
transportation costs will drop by a third and river shipping is much safer as
the many gorges prior to construction were notoriously dangerous.
Ships with a deeper draught can now travel from Shanghai
to Chongqing (fifteen hundred miles upstream) increasing their cargo movement
fivefold.
 Due to the construction of the dam, ships must be lifted or lowered about 100 metres. Because of this height, the water pressure required for a single lock would be too much for one gate to withstand. Instead, the dam uses two locks, each with five gates to raise or lower the vessel about 20 metres. The two ship locks installed along the two sides of the dam have a total length of 1607 metres. Each gate 280 metres long, 34 metres wide and five metres deep. The Maximum vessel size is 10,000 tons which has reduced shipping by 25 per cent over previous years. There is a little difference between the downstream and upstream shipping. One is release water, the other is store water. Downstream (from Chongqing to Yichang/Shanghai): the fifth gate is the first to open and release water to the same level of the fourth one. Then the fourth gate opens and the ship comes through the fourth gate and so on. Upstream (from Shanghai/Yichang to Chongqing): ship comes to the first gate and store water to the same level of the second gate and so on. Transit time is between three and four hours.
We rounded the bend at the end of the bridge, I could have sat for ages watching the chums and their movements. A little way on and we pulled in to a park outside a large ‘shop’. At the back was a massive 3D model of the Three Gorges Dam, after a guided talk we went to see the real thing.
ALL IN ALL AN AWESOME CONSTRUCTION
PROJECT ON A MASSIVE SCALE - HOW
CHINESE |
