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:
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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[00:00:00] Will: The worst version of a dam collapse was deliberate. It's from a different era in China. In 1930s, Chiang Kai shek was fighting a war against the Japanese and decided, well, we could flood this area by tunneling through these dams and bursting them. And it stopped the Japanese, but it killed 800, 000 people.
[00:00:15] Rod: You're focusing on the negative. It stopped the Japanese. 800 thousand
[00:00:21] Will: biggest weapons of mass destruction that we have and that we've used yeah, but they're sitting all around the world and Dams are great dams do a lot of wonderful things but we can have a conversation about them I think.
[00:00:41] One quote from Someone that was at the scene at the time said it was like the sky was collapsing
[00:00:48] Rod: Like a phrase like that is really good. Cause you think about it and you go, wow. And then you think, what the fuck does that actually look like? Yeah. The sky is collapsing for starters, the sky isn't made of anything.
[00:00:56] Will: Yeah, no, it's not. That can, you can't touch it. But by 1am on August the 8th, 1975, there was probably nothing that they could do to stop it. It was the biggest technological disaster ever. And one that you've probably never heard about. Welcome to the wholesome show
[00:01:22] Rod: podcast that tries to desperately plug the whole of science and disaster is imminent. And you know what? I'll plug it even if it's not.
[00:01:28] Will: The wholesome show is me, Will Grant
[00:01:32] Rod: and not him, rod Lambert. I forgot my name there.
[00:01:35] Will: We've probably been building dams for thousands of years. The oldest dam that we've got good evidence for, of like a sizable sort of thing, is the Jawa Dam. It's about 5, 000 years old.
[00:01:45] Rod: Sorry, I'm just revisiting your opening now and going, oh! God, hold up this piece of wood. You get behind me and hold my back. That's horrifying.
[00:01:57] Will: The Jawa Dam in in Jordan, it's about 5, 000 years old. There's probably evidence of like smaller scale river structures and stuff like that that's much older.
[00:02:04] Rod: Like beaver dams.
[00:02:05] Will: Yes. But this was a sizable sort of dam. Like it was in the tens of meters high or something like that. But if there ever, if ever there was an era of the dam, it was the middle of the 20th century.
[00:02:17] Between 1950 and 1980, the world just went damn mad. They went dam. 10 times increase in the world's dam capacity. Went from 500 cubic kilometers in storage to 5, 000 cubic kilometers in storage. And I know you can visualise a cubic kilometer.
[00:02:34] Rod: Yeah, it's like when you get all the beads in one hippie commune multiplied by 400 years stacked up on top of each other.
[00:02:40] Will: Yeah, that's it. That's the common method for it
[00:02:43] Rod: cubic hippie beads.
[00:02:44] It doesn't
[00:02:44] Will: matter. It doesn't matter. The cubic kilometers are relevant. It just over 30 years, we went 10 times the capacity. They just, they were just building dams everywhere and everyone got in on the act. You got Democrats and dictators, you know, people in, in, in the developing world and in the developed world, you got politicians in Australia, in America, you got politicians in the Soviet Union, all throughout Africa, everywhere. Everyone is building. Well, you know why? I mean, it's a triumph of humanity over nature. Modernity over backwardness.
[00:03:15] Rod: They look cool too.
[00:03:16] Will: Concrete over forests.
[00:03:18] Rod: That's a victory I want. But also they're cool. Like, I mean, you stand on a dam and you look over and go, Oh, there's a lot going on. Like they're remarkable.
[00:03:26] Will: I've only been to like medium sized, large dams. And I know that there are vast dams out there. Like, like, I was watching a video on the three gorges dam. The other day, you remember gladiator, they get to Rome for the first time. And one of the other slaves alongside Russell Crowe says, I didn't know men could build things like this.
[00:03:43] I was watching the video on the three gorges dam. And I was like, I did not know. I did not know we could do something like that. Everyone around the world was loving dams. They're like celebrating.
[00:03:54] Rod: It's impossible not to go "damn" all the time. Like impossible. It's killing me. My head is hurting.
[00:03:59] Will: So I said, you know, dictators got in on the act. Now Chairman Mao leader of the communist party in China, after they came to power in 1949, he was like, well, dams, it is. We are, we're gonna do a lot of these in China.
[00:04:14] Rod: What wouldn't an emperor do?
[00:04:16] Will: What wouldn't an emperor do? Well, they didn't in the past do a lot of dams.
[00:04:19] Rod: This is what I'm saying. It was genius.
[00:04:20] Will: And he ordered, you know, from, it came to power in 1949, from like 1950 let's slam out the dams.
[00:04:26] Rod: There's a river there. Why the fuck haven't we blocked it yet?
[00:04:28] Will: Well, for a lot of good reasons, obviously they wanted development. So they were like hydroelectricity, dams can do that. That's awesome. Yeah. Irrigation, you know, you can block off a whole lot of water and then you can irrigate more areas. But also China is famously flood prone.
[00:04:42] Rod: So lots of dams should help that.
[00:04:44] Will: Dams absolutely can help with floods. Absolutely can.
[00:04:47] Rod: They hold water.
[00:04:47] Will: And put people to work as well. In fact, after he swam across the Yangtze river in 1958, that was to prove that he was still, you know, virile. Yeah.
[00:04:55] Rod: I can swim. How old was he then? 109.
[00:04:57] Will: I don't know how old he was in 1958, but he swam across the river to show that he can swim across rivers. And then he wrote a poem. About his obsession with dams. Great plans are being made. Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west. The mountain goddess, if she is still there, will marvel at a world so changed.
[00:05:15] Rod: That's more like haiku, not that he'd ever admit that because that'd be Japanese.
[00:05:18] Will: Yeah, probably. Now there's one area in China that he was like, okay, this is the one we got to tackle because it was famously flood prone. It's called the Huai River in Chinese geography. You've got the Yellow River is the biggest, longest river in the Northern sort of section of the country. And you got the Yangtze River, which is the biggest, longest river in the Southern bit of the country.
[00:05:41] Anyway, halfway between is the Huai River. It's a substantial river. There's a lot of stuff there, but the problem is that it's of all of China, the most flood prone bit. Something to do with the weather systems. Like it was just historically lots and lots of rain there and it would just come on down.
[00:05:58] Rod: Burst the banks and I assume the land was flat so it just kind of went squidge.
[00:06:01] Will: Yeah. So there was some severe flooding in the 1950s and Mao said, all right, we need to harness the Huai River. It's going to control the river and prevent it flooding and it's going to, you know, do the irrigation and the electricity. The key project in this was called the Banqiao Dam. There weren't really any dam building experts in China at the time.
[00:06:21] Rod: cool do it anyway. A gentle yet auspicious way to start something. There weren't really many, you know, experts.
[00:06:31] Will: It was a new thing. It was a new thing. So they brought in some people from the Soviet Union. They were friends at the time.
[00:06:36] Rod: Yeah, and the Soviets were renowned for quality workspersonship, particularly towards the end of the war and afterwards.
[00:06:41] Will: Hey, maybe I'm telling you a story about a happy dam
[00:06:44] Rod: I suspect you are. There, put concrete. There, more concrete. Maybe some rocks. You got any old iron steel? I don't care. Metals. Throw him in. Oh, look, dead cow. Can't eat. Throw in them. Make wall.
[00:07:01] Will: It is two peoples at that time that really wanted to build things really quickly. And I think they would have done a lot of not looking into the rules and not looking into the best practice and just getting it up as quick as they can.
[00:07:13] Rod: Don't you have to like, I've often wondered, like I've often wondered about dams. So you've got a river or whatever and you want to block it off and behind it, it goes tall and on the other side it doesn't. Surely you kind of got to build it quickly because the water will start rising the moment you start blocking it. If the water is constantly spewing over the top.
[00:07:30] Will: No, there's techniques.
[00:07:32] Rod: Oh, you like, you put up a tarpauline and some what do you call it, star picket?
[00:07:35] Will: No. You can divert the river. Famously you could dig a tunnel in advance and divert the river around it.
[00:07:41] Rod: I didn't think of that.
[00:07:41] Will: Or you could, you keep a hole in the bottom of the dam and you build the dam above the river and the water cau up the hole.
[00:07:47] Rod: You're an innovator. Cork it. Yeah, that's back to the cow.
[00:07:50] Will: Well, you can get underwater concrete if you want. Probably don't do that. Look, don't come to the wholesome show for your dam building engineering, except for where it goes wrong. We can tell you about it.
[00:08:00] Rod: Come for the emotions about it though.
[00:08:02] Will: So the Banqiao Dam was built took a couple of years, 118 metres high with a storage capacity.
[00:08:07] Rod: That's tall.
[00:08:08] Will: It's a tall dam and a storage capacity of 492 million cubic metres, which is half a cubic kilometre. Or pretty much bang on a Sydney Harbour for the proper metric. Key thing here, it was designed to withstand a one in a thousand year flood, which they guess to be about half a metre of rain over a three day period
[00:08:30] Rod: and probably 999 years away because all those things are always, if it's one in a hundred years, that means it's a hundred years away.
[00:08:36] Will: Well, and this one's a thousand. So yeah, it's not going to happen for ages yeah. But from word go, there were some problems.
[00:08:41] Rod: Were there?
[00:08:43] Will: So firstly, the government was much more interested in the whole irrigation and harnessing the power of the water than it was worrying about flood control. The vice premier at the time said that primacy should be given to water for agriculture. Alright. In fact, retaining more water meant more revolutionary. And worrying about flooding that was counter revolutionary or conservative or reactionary.
[00:09:08] Rod: Ideology does not trump physics ever, ever. It just blows my mind. Whenever I hear it, I'm like really?
[00:09:17] Will: There was a whistleblower who was a hydrologist who was working on the project called Chen Xing. And he said look what you're designing here, not going to work, not going to work. And he said, first of all, we don't have enough sluice gates on the dam, we've got to have more and it's going to cause problems downstream.
[00:09:34] Rod: Stories that start with, there weren't enough insert safety device here. Always end in a movie.
[00:09:40] Will: Yeah, well, he was fired. And some stories say he was sent to a labor camp
[00:09:45] Rod: which is bullshit. They just killed him. he's probably in the dam.
[00:09:47] Will: No. They did not kill him. They did not kill him because, well, we'll hear more from him later. Anyway, they did label him a right wing opportunist fired him, sent him for reeducation. I think that's not quite clear. The first problem, focus on the irrigation. Second problem, they were cheap and they didn't put enough sluice gates in.
[00:10:03] And third problem, this is a really interesting one, is that the government was doing at the time this intense new agriculture and new steel production. So they're cutting down forests all over the place, all of the forests. Cool. And Yeah, that makes rain behave a little bit differently.
[00:10:20] Rod: And that's great. It doesn't change where the systems, doesn't change heat patterns. Nothing.
[00:10:24] Will: Anyway, they got the dam built and it was declared, possibly the Soviets or possibly the Chinese government at the time to be an iron dam, a dam that could not be broken.
[00:10:33] Rod: Unsinkable, would you say?
[00:10:36] Will: You know, that's like a red rag to me.
[00:10:38] Rod: Fuck, I love it.
[00:10:40] Will: At the beginning of August 1975, a typhoon began to form in the waters out in the Pacific Ocean between Japan, China, and the Philippines.
[00:10:48] Rod: Cool, never happened, so they wouldn't have expected it.
[00:10:50] Will: First typhoon ever.
[00:10:51] Rod: Yep, what a shock, yep.
[00:10:53] Will: It started heading west. A couple of days later, it peaked in intensity, got to category four, which is a pretty strong storm. Crossed over Taiwan on August 3rd. I think it did some damage there, but I think it missed Taipei, but did some damage, calmed down a lot when it went over the mountains in the middle of Taiwan. And then it kept going into China. Now, at this point, it's not a very intense typhoon anymore. It's gone down from category one down to a tropical storm.
[00:11:19] Rod: Hold my beer territory. Yeah.
[00:11:21] Will: The wind isn't so bad, but the thing is, it's still holding a shitload of water. Passes through Fujian province and continues North into Henan province. And then it hits cooler air from the North and it just starts to dump rain.
[00:11:35] Rod: Like a million people throwing a bucket a second.
[00:11:37] Will: Yeah, so it passes over the Banqiao area where the dam is. There were three storms on August 5th, 6th and 7th. Each of them dropped about half a meter. So you've got half a meter a day,
[00:11:50] Rod: three once in a thousand year events. This is once in 3000 years. Wow. That's impressive. Better buy a lottery ticket.
[00:11:57] Will: Three one in a thousand year events. So in fact, in one six hour period, I think they got up to 800 mils. So close to a meter in six. I try to visualize what a meter of water coming down in a day is like, it's just, you know, we talk about rain here. I know Canberra is not the wettest place in the world. You know, a big storm would be 20 mils or something like that to get to 800 mils
[00:12:21] Rod: like a 50 mil storm when they, you know, you've had a day where you've gone, holy shit, it crapped with rain all day today. And they go, that was 45 mils. And you're like, really? Was 45?
[00:12:29] Will: And I know that some of you out there in listener land, you come from wetter places, but still, not in this chart
[00:12:34] Rod: luckily the iron dam. So it went well.
[00:12:41] Will: the iron dam was meant to handle 0. 5 meters over a three day period. So it's three times that much. By August 8th, the reservoirs in the Banqiao dam and a whole bunch of other dams around had filled to capacity. So they opened up all of the sluice gates. They didn't have very many. The water kept rising. Workers were marshaled by the army to start sandbagging the top of the dam.
[00:13:07] Rod: Let's make it taller. Hurry.
[00:13:09] Will: That's what they were literally trying to do. Literally, they had workers on top of the dam sandbagging it, trying to keep this flood back, which I can imagine being both, it's heroic. It's literally heroic. You are putting your life on the line in front of a giant flood of water. And maybe you're going to help people downstream, but.
[00:13:29] Rod: But is pointless sacrifice heroic?
[00:13:31] Will: I don't know if it's pointless.
[00:13:32] Rod: I've got a feeling it might've been. I can feel it in my waters.
[00:13:37] Will: At about 1am something happened. Some people said there was a noise. A blair, but this is where someone said, visually, it was like the sky collapsed. Like everything started to slide away. And I think what they're saying is the water level behind the dam. So they're looking at the water level and it's sort of turbulent and you know, there's lots of rain and turbulence and stuff like that, but it's not moving, but suddenly it just starts to go and your horizon starts going, Whoa, what is going on? That flat surface is now disappearing under me.
[00:14:08] Rod: Yeah, that's a good sign. It's going down.
[00:14:10] Will: It didn't take very much. So if water gets to the top of the dam, it only takes, I think it got to 30 centimetres over the top of the dam. Like literally over the top, a foot, that's it over the, once you're over the top, then you get the water starts to erode.
[00:14:25] It starts to erode the top of the dam and the back of the dam. And very quickly. A few inches of water start racing over the top and chewing away at the dam's crest. The dam was soon pulverized by hundreds of billions of liters of water. An older woman shouted, Chu Jiaozi, the river dragon has come. The dam collapsed. A rush of water. A tsunami, inland tsunami, 10 meters high and 11 kilometers wide.
[00:14:51] Rod: Oh, you're fucked. You're fucked. 10 meters, 10 meters of water. It doesn't have to move fast. It just has to move.
[00:14:58] Will: But it's also 11 kilometers wide. It is it's a front. There is no running around. It's traveling at 50 kilometers an hour down into the valley. There's a town not far away called Daowencheng, 9, 600 citizens they knew lived there before just instantly wiped
[00:15:14] Rod: evaporated
[00:15:15] Will: roads, telegraph lines, bridges, houses, people, everything is just getting swept away by this incredible volume of water. Like it's Sydney Harbor just flooding instantly down out of a
[00:15:26] Rod: 10 meters high, 11 kilometers wide moving at 50 kilometers an hour.
[00:15:30] Will: Yeah. Hoping to reduce the damage because this is moving fast, but it's not instant. It's 50 kilometers an hour and we're talking, you know, it's hundreds of kilometers downstream to the coast. The army started bombing the dams downstream to let the water out in advance.
[00:15:45] Rod: So what a situation.
[00:15:47] Will: Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So, so. Firstly, there's not many places to evacuate to, and the army is like, okay, if the water hits that dam, it's instantly going to destroy that dam and add the volume of water there. So if we bought it, let's release the dam early,
[00:16:04] Rod: let some pressure off.
[00:16:05] Will: It didn't really help. In total 61 dams were pulverized.
[00:16:09] Rod: Oh, come on.
[00:16:09] Will: Yeah. Banqiao was the biggest. There was a couple that were similar, you know, a bit smaller but large down, 61 of different sorts of sizes. some of them were bombed and some of them some of them were pulverized by the flood.
[00:16:21] Rod: And the difference was where the dudes got to go pew as well. Cause seriously. The ultimate result, all fucked.
[00:16:27] Will: It may have helped. Like it might've been the thing that you look at it and you go, can this help? That we're not being baddies and doing nothing.
[00:16:33] Rod: And I think that actually makes a lot of sense. You just want to make it, you can kind of calm the flow.
[00:16:38] Will: It instantly wiped out an area 55 kilometers long, 15 kilometers wide. That was just completely pulverized. Created a temporary Lake as large as 12, 000 square kilometers. Seven cities were inundated as well as with thousands of square kilometers of countryside. I'm going to jump a little ahead in the story though, because I want to note something here that have you heard of this before? You might be surprised but the Communist Party of China, and this was a particular period, it was in the middle or the end of the cultural revolution. Yeah. So there was a lot of control on the media and was there, they didn't tell a lot of stories, other things going on
[00:17:14] Rod: changed a lot since then.
[00:17:15] Will: But to this day, not a lot of people in China know about this. The government, of course, knew about this, and the people affected, of course, knew about it, but the story didn't really start to emerge in China until at least 20 years later and more globally in that sort of period.
[00:17:33] Rod: It's impressive to be able to control shit like that strongly. Cause that's big. There were a couple of people affected.
[00:17:37] Will: I think you could probably say it was a flood and not necessarily blame the dam. It took until 1995, so 20 years later, the official Chinese government news agency confirmed what had happened.
[00:17:50] Well, there's a book called the great floods in China's history. And and the person who was minister for water resources at the time in the seventies and eighties wrote a preface and said, and yes, there was the Banqiao dam collapse.
[00:18:03] Rod: Just, to be fair, I just want to, that one wasn't really quite a flood because,
[00:18:07] Will: well, and that wasn't even confirming everything. Not until 2005, it was an official state secret. How many people died and what exactly.
[00:18:15] Rod: Stop it. Just stop it. Any country. I don't care. Here, there, anywhere. Stop it.
[00:18:21] Will: So how many people died? The official figures from China now say 26, 000 people died.
[00:18:28] Rod: So a million.
[00:18:31] Will: Well, well, everything else suggests a lot. There's no certainty on this, but it's probably around a quarter of a million people, 240 000. Probably a hundred thousand died in the instant wave. Like it's something like that, that are just like straight away, dying in the flood and 140, 000 are dying in the famines and the epidemics, all of that happened afterwards.
[00:18:54] And this is the interesting thing. We don't have a lot of footage. There's footage of the Banqiao dam, like a picture of the Banqiao dam. But there's no footage of this happening and it didn't grab visual impact. And so there was a discovery channel, did a list of the Top 10 technological disasters of the 20th century.
[00:19:12] And Chernobyl was on that list. And I think Chernobyl was number two, but the Banqiao Dam, like in terms of the impact it's just vast, but no one really knew about it. The Chinese government said it was a natural failure. They said, look, this was, it was built to a one in 1000 year flood, but this was a one in 2000 year flood. What could we do?
[00:19:32] Rod: Why did it happen? It was natural, man. It's a natural failure. Of course it was a natural failure. Naturally. You didn't know what the fuck you were doing.
[00:19:40] Will: You know, you know, this goes back and we talked about this ages ago. I think it was on the potato famine. There's no such thing as a natural disaster. There are natural hazards. Any disaster has human bits in it. Like either it's a disaster because we suffer or we make it worse or whatever. There's no just natural disaster.
[00:19:57] Rod: Yep. Wrath of God.
[00:19:58] Will: Afterwards, Chen Xing, the whistleblower who said you're not building the dam. He was drafted into to help rebuild the dam as well. Let's do it properly this time.
[00:20:10] Rod: I don't want it. Can we have four sluices this time?
[00:20:12] Will: And around the world, dam building is back in fashion. It's not quite as big as it was in the fifties, sixties and seventies, but there's a massive dam building spree going on around the world. And China is taking part in a lot of this. There's something like 4, 000 major hydroelectric dams that are in planning or construction.
[00:20:29] Rod: In planning, not in existence? To come.
[00:20:31] Will: Yeah. Yeah there's a lot. And the thing that is worth remembering is the Bankiao Dam is definitely the worst version of this disaster. Well, okay. The worst accidental version of this disaster.
[00:20:45] Rod: There's deliberate? You're talking about the dam busters from 1944.
[00:20:49] Will: I'll tell you the deliberate in a sec, but we don't have to go very far back to look at some other examples of dam collapses. There's the Machuchu Dam in India, which collapsed in 1979, killing 25, 000.
[00:21:01] The Vajont Dam in Italy in 1959 killed 2000, St. Francis Dam in California, 1928 killed 600. The Malpasset Dam in France, 1959 kills 421. So these are not just developing countries, lots of dams. In 2019, the Brumadinho dam in Brazil burst, killing 270. In July, 2018, a Korean built dam collapsed on the border of Laos and Cambodia, killing hundreds but we don't really know because it's not an area where we know a lot about what's going on. Dams are dangerous.
[00:21:35] Rod: Why?
[00:21:36] Will: I don't doubt that dams have done a lot of good and certainly they can prevent floods and certainly they can bring irrigation, but there's a couple of things that we've got dams around the world that are getting older and they sit above cities all around the world, all around the world. This is not a corrupt country thing or a good country thing or anything like that. This is a problem around the world that we have a lot of old dams and they are a weapon of mass destruction sitting straight above all of our cities.
[00:22:05] Rod: So should I be worried about Scrivener dam in Canberra? Cause.
[00:22:09] Will: Probably not.
[00:22:10] Rod: That could kill some kangaroos.
[00:22:12] Will: But I said, you know, this was the worst accidental version. It's not the worst version of a dam collapse. The worst version of a dam collapse was deliberate. Again, we don't know heaps about this, but it's from a different era in China.
[00:22:26] In 1930s Chang Kai Shek was fighting a war against the Japanese and decided, well, we could flood this area by tunneling through these dams and bursting them and it stopped the Japanese, but it killed 800, 000 people.
[00:22:38] Rod: Yeah, but you're focusing on the negative. It's stopped the Japanese. 800, 000
[00:22:45] Will: biggest weapons of mass destruction that we have are sitting right above
[00:22:49] Rod: or that we've used.
[00:22:51] Will: Yes. And that we've used. But they're sitting all around the world and I think. Dams are great. Dams do a lot of wonderful things. But we can have a conversation about them, I think.
[00:23:02] Rod: We just did.
