Tan Jing (R), inspector of geological hazards at the Huangtupo Monitoring and Early Warning Station for Secondary Geological Disasters, explains the conditions of the building to hotel manager Wang Daming at the Jintang Hotel in Badong County, central China's Hubei Province, Sept. 7, 2011.
Unlike most of the people, Tan Jing watches late night TV shows not for entertainment but to drive out sleepiness.
As an inspector of geological hazards at the Huangtupo Monitoring and Early Warning Station for Secondary Geological Disasters, Tan had to work with three other inspectors in two shifts of 24 hours.
In the daytime, the 30-year-old would carry out routine survey patrols to find symptoms of landslides, cave-ins and mud-and-rock flows in the 1.35-square-kilometer Huangtupo area.
In the evening, besides extra patrols on raining nights, he had to stay at the station and remain alert all the time in case of any possible phone call from disaster control authorities.
To guard the lives in Huangtupo from natural disasters, monitoring facilities like the Huangtupo Monitoring and Early Warning Station for Secondary Geological Disasters were set up.
Tan's station was equipped with a broadcasting system and a direct phone line with the disaster control authorities so that residents can be alarmed immediately after geological disasters were detected.
Tan said he and all the other colleagues had got used to watching TV until four o'clock in the morning.
"Sometimes when coming back from a survey patrol late at night, I felt really exhausted but dare not sleep," Tan said, "I know thousands of lives are counting on me."
For ages, the Chinese suffered from the flood-prone Yangtze. For ages, the Chinese strived to tame the unforgiving waters.
A water control project at the Three Gorges area was envisaged as early as 1918 by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, forerunner of China's democratic revolution in the early 20th century, but was shelved due to technical obstacles and social turbulence until Communist leader Mao Zedong proposed a dam and reservoir at the Three Gorges area in the 1950s.
It was hoped, in a poem penned by Chairman Mao in 1956, that "walls of stone will stand upstream to the west", from which "a smooth lake" would arise in "the narrow gorges".
Since then, China had kicked off preparation for harnessing the Yangtze and constructing the Three Gorges project.
A great amount of work in investigations, feasibility studies, tests and examinations, had been done with the participation of thousands of experts from China and abroad. A small dam was even built in the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River as a trial-and-error project.
After protracted debates and researches for around half a century, the plan to build a dam for flood control and power generation was approved in 1992 and the construction of the Three Gorges project, whose main components include the dam, a five-tier ship lock, and 26 hydropower turbo-generators, began one year after.
Completed in 2006, the Three Gorges Dam run at full capacity in 2008 for the first time as water levels at the 185-meter-deep dam reached 175 meters.
In a statement issued in May 2011, the State Council, or China's cabinet, admitted that the Three Gorges project had caused some problems ranging from resident relocation to geological hazards while bringing "great and comprehensive benefits".
But life still carries on. People, millions of them, are making their little but valuable contribution towards the success of the world's largest water control and hydroelectric project. (Xinhua/Liu Jinhai)
