In general, I grudgingly acknowledge the need for dams, since hydroelectricity is the second largest source of climate change gas free electricity.
Two American dams however really break my heart. One is the Hetch Hetchy dam which has turned the second Yosemite Valley into a pool of silt and water. The other is the Glen Canyon dam, that has drowned one of the most magnificient geological formations in the United States.
My opposition to the Glen Canyon dam was consistent even before I stumbled across this story of how two centimeters came between the greatest disaster in US history - a disaster that may have damaged the Grand Canyon among other things - and oblivion.
Another notable near miss occurred at the 216-metre Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado during heavy floods in June 1983. One of the dam’s two spillways (which are tunnels through rock at the side of the dam rather than uncovered chutes as at Tarbela) partially caved in. The threat this posed to the stability of the dam abutments meant that both spillways had to be shut. Powell Reservoir, however, kept rising, and would have overtopped the gates of the endangered spillways had not plywood boards obtained from a local lumberyard been fastened to the top of the gates, holding back the reservoir for a few more nerve-wracking days.
BuRec engineers, according to an internal memo, thought there would be an ‘uncontrolled release’ if the reservoir reached 3,708.40 feet above sea level. The reservoir finally peaked at 3,708.34 feet. Less than an inch — around two centimetres — saved the lower Colorado from probably the most massive flood in human history.14 Banqiao and Shimantan combined released 600 million cubic meters of water: Powell Reservoir in June 1983 held more than 33 billion cubic metres.
The Banqiao dam failure is the greatest energy disaster in human history. The true death toll will never be known but this link Of Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams from which the above quote is pulled has this to say:
By far the world’s worst dam disaster occurred in Henan province in central China in August 1975. As many as 230,000 people may have died in the catastrophe, yet for two decades it was successfully airbrushed from history by the Chinese authorities. If the Chinese had not prevented news of the calamity from reaching the outside world, Henan would presumably represent for the public image of the dam industry what Chernobyl and Bhopal represent for the nuclear and chemical industries.1
Detailed information on the Henan catastrophe was first published in English by the US based group Human Rights Watch in February 1995 in a report on human rights violations at the Three Gorges Dam. Their account is based on a small number of articles by top Chinese water resources experts published in limited-circulation books and journals in the relatively open period of the late 1980s, and on an unpublished investigative account written under a pseudonym by a well-known mainland Chinese journalist...
...August 13: Two million people across the district are trapped by the water . . . In Runan, 100,000 who were initially submerged but somehow survived are still floating in the water. In Shangcai, another 600,000 are surrounded by the flood; 4,000 members of Liudayu Brigade in Huabo Commune have stripped the trees bare and eaten all the leaves . . .
August 17: There are still 1.1 million people trapped in the water . . . the disease morbidity rate has soared. According to incomplete statistics, 1.13 million people have contracted illnesses . . .
August 18: Altogether 880,000 people are surrounded by water in Shangcai and Xincai. Out of 500,000 people in Runan, 320,000 have now been stricken with disease, including 33,000 cases of dysentery . .
There is a wonderful Swedish movie about a boy who loses his mother to turberculosis in the 1950's. It's called "My Life As A Dog," and it is set around the time that the Soviet Union launched the first living thing into orbit, a dog named Laika. The boy, sent away from his dying mother to live with relatives he barely knows, muses continuously about his own situation and that of the dog who was sent into space with no hope of return.
Throughout the movie in a voice over the boy says, "You have to compare."
You have to compare.