01
Since June, it has been raining in the south, and the sky above me is like a hole that cannot be stopped.
In mid-June, Guilin, Guangxi Province was hit by torrential rain one after another, and the water level of Guilin on the Lijiang River exceeded the warning water level by nearly 3 meters, exceeding the water level of the 1998 Lijiang River flood.
Then, the Huangshan Mountain in Anhui Province was affected by the heavy rainfall and the flood disaster occurred, the ancient town of Chengkan was invaded by floods, the turbid yellow river water rushed in the river trough of Huizhou dwellings like wild horses, and the pavilion on the Huanxiu Bridge in the Yuan Dynasty was washed away, completely lost the calmness of "washing vegetables upstream and washing downstream Huan Wash".
By the end of June, the water level in Wuhan had risen by 5 meters in less than 10 days, and for the first time in three years, it had crossed 25 meters, and waterlogging was occurring in parts of the city.
Heavy rain and flood discharge, the water of the Qiantang River is also full, the bridge deck of the majestic Zhijiang Bridge is close to the water surface, and it seems that the bridge deck and the water surface are only a line of sky from a distance.
The Qiantang River basin has suffered another catastrophic flood, the last time in 2020.
The walls of Quzhou Shuitingmen have collapsed, and the Fuchun River, which flows through Fuyang City, has risen to the embankment, and part of Fuyang has been soaked in water.
Residents on a number of sand islands on the Fuchun River also began to move, and the houses on the islands were soon flooded with floodwater, revealing only their roofs.
In order to discharge the flood, the Xin'anjiang Reservoir opened the gate to release water, from a single hole to five holes to seven holes, and then back to five holes. The reason is that the downstream is already overwhelmed.
For a while, the clear water of Qiandao Lake tilted out, and at first it was ridiculed by netizens that "hundreds of thousands of bottles of Nongfu Spring were released every second", and then they began to be afraid that if they were put down like this, the downstream city of Hangzhou would be in danger.
Fortunately, knowledgeable netizens popularized science in the message:
Put 100 hearts, Hangzhou's river embankments are designed in accordance with the storm surge and flood integration, and the standard of sea ponds. Waterlogging is still possible at the point of occurrence, but it is impossible for a major flood to occur in the urban area.
In addition, the Hangzhou Bay facing the sea spreads out like a horn mouth, and no matter how much water flows in the upper reaches of the Qiantang River, it will be unloaded by the giant water outlet here, which is where the unique advantage of coastal cities lies.
But even so, the water of the West Lake is still level with the shore of the lake, and the lake water pours into the residential areas on the shore, and many communities can only use high-pressure water cannons to drain the water.
But this possibility is almost zero.
2024 is the year when El Niño has just exited, but it has encountered extreme weather, resulting in extreme imbalance in precipitation, and the situation of flooding in the south and drought in the north is extremely prominent.
The rainy season in Guangxi and Guangxi finally passed, and the subtropical high pressure belt began to jump northward again, jumping from the southern coast to the Yangtze River basin, and the rainy season began.
But this rainy season is not an ordinary rainy season, it can be called "violent".
The strong cold and warm air mass formed a straight, narrow linear area over Hunan to northern Zhejiang, which became a hotbed of heavy rain, thunder, lightning and strong convective air.
02
Especially in Hunan.
In some parts of Changsha, the rainfall exceeded 70 mm in one hour, reaching the level of extremely heavy rain, and 54 West Lakes rained in one hour, raining 5% of the annual rainfall.
directly led to Dongting Lake, which plays an important role in flood discharge in Hunan, on the hot search.
On the afternoon of July 5, the Tuanzhou embankment of Dongting Lake, located in Huarong County, Yueyang City, Hunan Province, broke down, affecting the hearts of the people of the whole country.
You must know that Dongting Lake is the second largest freshwater lake in China, and it is also the first "big pool" of the Yangtze River into the middle and lower reaches of the region.
Judging from the map, Hunan is surrounded by mountains on three sides, adjacent to the Yangtze River in the north, and Dongting Lake is just in the "gap" of northern Hunan, on the one hand, the Xiangjiang River, Zishui, Yuanjiang River, and Lishui that originate between the mountains are all taken into the arms, and on the other hand, the water system flowing into the entire Hunan is diverted into the Yangtze River through the three mouths of Songzi, Taiping, and Lotus Pond (plus the tuning tuned that was blocked in 1958, commonly known as "four mouths"), and finally flows into the Yangtze River together from the Chenglingji of Yueyang.
As the "strongest lake" in the Yangtze River basin, Dongting Lake's ability to "swallow and spit out" during the flood season is directly related to the safety of the lives and property of hundreds of millions of people in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River.
Its importance not only to Hunan, but also to the entire middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River cannot be ignored.
But this time, the local heavy rain and the swimming flood have tested the storage capacity of Dongting Lake again and again, but I did not expect that Dongting Lake could not withstand this turbulent flood this time, and the embankment burst under the overwhelming situation.
The embankment is located in Tuanzhou Yuan, Huarong County, and the so-called "embankment" refers to the low-lying area surrounded by the embankment.
When Dongting Lake is calm, it is rich in water resources and rich in various trace elements, and the people who live here farm and fish here, a scene of water towns and Zeguo.
But during the flood season, it is very dangerous here, if the surrounding levees can withstand the floods, it is fine, if they can't resist it, there is a danger of bursting, then the people who live here have to leave everything behind and evacuate immediately.
Just like this time.
At the beginning, there was a pipe gushing at the first-line embankment (station number 19+800) of Dongting Lake in Tuanzhou, the so-called "embankment of a thousand miles, collapsed in the anthill", if the treatment was not timely, delaying the opportunity to consolidate the embankment, the pipe gushing would be like ants, "gnawing" the dam, so that the dam was a little hollow, until it collapsed directly.
03
Fortunately, the local response was very timely this time, and the containment work of the embankment began as soon as possible.
But the way of containment at the beginning made many netizens criticize.
At that time, a small whirlpool could be seen in the middle of Dongting Lake, which was a sign of pipe gushing, and the staff standing on the embankment also found it, but because the whirlpool was relatively small at that time, there was no obvious leakage, so it did not attract the attention of relevant departments.
It wasn't until the whirlpool was getting bigger and bigger, and the pipe surge was getting more and more serious, that the vehicles and ships for rescue and disaster relief began to be seen at the scene.
Unexpectedly, the two sand pumping boats that were urgently transferred aimed at the embankment and directly began to spray sand and gravel.
I have seen the use of sandbags to build a line of defense to block floods, and the first time I have seen the use of sand and gravel to directly fill the gap.
In a turbulent flood, isn't this dumping method "fighting fires" with pay?
Even elementary school students know that sandbags can block water, stones can block water, but sand and gravel can't block water.
Anyway, we are not professionals, but we can't understand what the local authorities think, and we missed the best period anyway.
Seeing that the dam had burst about 10 meters away, the people of the relevant departments saw that it was not possible to block it like this, and they transferred more than 10 large trucks from nowhere to rush down to block the embankment.
In particular, the four big characters on the red banner on the car body, "replacing the warehouse with the car", directly fill the atmosphere, and there is a kind of tragedy of bombing the bunker.
I don't know what this is doing, what kind of warehouse is this generation?
Even my mother, an old man in her 60s, knows that this car is not as good as steel plates.
As you can see, the filling failed to work for a while, and that night, the width of the embankment was extended to about 100 meters, and a large amount of Dongting Lake water poured into Tuanzhou Yuan.
From the comparison of satellite images of local waters transmitted online, it can be clearly seen that the area inundated by this flood can be clearly seen.
Soon, more than 700 county and rural cadres were mobilized to investigate each household and urgently transfer the residents to the safety zone overnight, or to the schools in the county town for centralized resettlement.
According to media reports, as of 23 o'clock on July 5, 5,755 people had been safely relocated and resettled, and there were no casualties, when the width of the embankment had exceeded 150 meters.
It was a sleepless night.
On the one hand, the transfer of more than 5,000 people, on the other hand, is the emergency containment of the rescue team and the reinforcement of the embankment:
A total of 3,200 bags of sand and gravel were filled, 6 kilometers of embankments were added, and 10.3 kilometers of tarpaulins were laid.
Finally, when the water flow was relatively stable, at about 15 o'clock on July 6, the first line of embankment breach of Dongting Lake in Tuanzhouyuan, Huarong County officially began to close the dragon operation.
According to relevant experts, the plugging operation is underway, and the project period is expected to be about 4 days, and it is expected to be completed before 12 o'clock on July 9.
The state has also dispatched more rescue teams to provide support, and has done its best to do a good job in containment and rescue work.
You must know that once this levee bursts, many places downstream will become an ocean.
But who would have thought that the bursting of the embankment of Dongting Lake this time seems to be a natural disaster, but behind the natural disaster is the result of man-made for hundreds of years.
You must know that Dongting Lake was once the largest freshwater lake in the mainland, and once had an endless water surface, and the ancients said that "eight hundred miles of Dongting" was not built.
04
As the first of the three most shining pearls along the Yangtze River, Dongting Lake once had three times the amount of water flowing into the lake as Poyang Lake and 10 times that of Taihu Lake.
However, today's Dongting Lake has long lost its former appearance, not only has the water storage been greatly reduced, but even the lake itself has shrunk into three major parts like the Aral Sea.
From this map, it can be clearly seen that it is divided into three Dongting lakes, east, west and south.
But who would have thought that in the long river of history, this vast lake has experienced a process of "growing from small to big and then small":
As early as three or four thousand years ago in the Neolithic Age, the Dongting Lake area was covered with a dense river network and a plain landscape, and it was still an inconspicuous "small lake" until the Han and Jin dynasties;
After the Southern Dynasties, with the expansion of the Jingjiang Delta and the shrinkage of Guyun Mengze, the waters of the Dongting Lake area expanded, and in the Qing Dynasty, it was more than twice as large as it is now.
From the description of "Eight Hundred Miles of Dongting" at that time, it can be seen that the glory of Dongting Lake was in the past, but in the last few hundred years, Dongting Lake has encountered two major problems, which has gradually reduced the lake surface, weakened its water storage capacity, and its majesty is not as good as before.
The first is the sediment brought from the upper reaches of the Yangtze River.
With the continuous development of the Yangtze River basin, soil erosion has become more and more serious, and the sediment from the upper reaches has flowed along the Yangtze River water to Dongting Lake, causing serious sediment accumulation in Dongting Lake, and the bottom of the lake has been continuously raised until it is partially exposed.
But that's only a small aspect.
The most important reason is that the residents along the lake are enclosing the lake day after day to create farmland.
It can be seen from the relevant records of ancient books that as early as the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, due to the frequent wars at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, a lot of ownerless wasteland was left around Dongting Lake, and a large number of immigrants began to pour into the area around Dongting Lake to settle at this time.
At that time, there was a saying about "mounds", and in order to get more arable land, the immigrants began to block the harbor and then open up the land after the silt was slightly higher, resulting in an increasing number of mounds in the area around Dongting Lake.
The fields are equipped with sluices, which are closed to control floods during the flood season and open to divert water during the dry season.
Slowly the immigrants who opened up the land here found that the lake field has more nutrients, the land fertility is higher, and the grain yield per mu of land is higher than that of the general field, and then the local grain output directly jumps to the forefront of the country, and more and more people begin to come here and the lake to grab land, build enclosed fields, and this has gradually become the main rice production area in Hunan.
Until around 1949, the motherland's economy was still relatively backward, and the people's food and clothing were also in urgent need of being solved.
It has indeed played a significant role in solving the problem of food and clothing.
But this is also the last wave of reclamation after the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Because the role of Dongting Lake is quite important, after so many years of encircling the lake and cultivating fields, the area of Dongting Lake has begun to shrink, and the area of Dongting Lake during the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties is about 6,000 square kilometers.
In the same year of the Qing Dynasty, the lotus pond and Songzi in the north of Dongting Lake burst one after another, making the Jingjiang River officially form the pattern of Songzi, Taiping, Lotus Pond and Tune String flowing southward to Dongting Lake, and the area of Dongting Lake once became larger.
But this was only a brief resurgence, and by 1978 the area of Dongting Lake had shrunk to 2,691 square kilometers.
It is less than half of the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, not to mention the "800 miles" in the same year of Xian, and the area is also below Poyang Lake.
Therefore, when Dongting Lake becomes smaller and smaller, its role in flood regulation and storage is also correspondingly reduced.
This is not the first time that the Dongting Lake has burst its banks, most recently in 1998, causing a lot of property damage.
It once again confirms the words of the German philosopher Hegel:
The only lesson that humanity has learned from history is that humanity has not learned any lessons from history.
After that, the state also learned from the pain and put forward the "32-character policy" to control Dongting Lake, and the first major task was to solve the work of returning farmland to the lake.
Unfortunately, reclamation is easy and difficult to return to the lake, and there is still a long way to go to control Dongting Lake, while the flooding of the Yangtze River cannot be delayed.
This time, the greed of human beings has been taught a good lesson by history again.
It's not easy to be original, if you like this article, your likes, forwards and messages are Uncle Mao's biggest motivation.