Transcript
This episode contains graphic descriptions that some audiences may find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised.
On the night of Aug 7, 1975, a line of people stood atop the Banqiao Dam in central China being pelted by the worst storm ever recorded in the region. Two days earlier, a freak weather event had caused more rain to fall in a single day than the area normally saw in an entire year…and it didn’t let up from there. Between August 5th and 7th, 63 inches of rain fell on the area, lifting the Banqiao reservoir faster than the dam could release it downstream.
By 10pm that night, Banqiao’s technicians watched in horror as their nightmare scenario unfolded…a scenario the dam’s engineers didn’t think was possible: the water rose to the very top of the eight-story edifice, breached its wave protection wall and began to spill over the other side. The technicians knew this critical breach meant the beginning of a death spiral.
Workers and soldiers who’d been dispatched to assist with the crisis frantically tried to pile up whatever they could to reinforce the wave wall and stem the tide – bags of straw, branches, even a bookshelf – but it was like throwing water balloons at a forest fire. The tide just kept rising.
All forms of communication to the outside world had been knocked out, so soldiers fired flare guns and rifles in a desperate attempt to warn those living downstream about their impending doom. But the rain was so intense, people could barely even keep their eyes open or speak to one another, much less notice distant flares and gunshots.
Just past midnight, Banqiao’s power station stopped generating electricity and the lights went dark. The situation became even more precarious for those still working helplessly as water kept rising beyond the crest of the dam to their ankles, shins, knees all the way up to their waists.
Then, just before 1 o’clock in the morning, a bolt of lightning lit up the sky followed immediately by an intense clap of thunder…then, silence. The rainstorm that had been raging for 13 hours straight stopped suddenly, the sky cleared and those on the dam could even see the stars begin to shine.
“The water level is going down! The flood is retreating!” someone yelled, overjoyed at the sudden turn of events. Almost in the blink of an eye, the water fell back down below the workers’ knees, shins, then ankles. Many began to cheer.
But one official who oversaw the dam turned pale. He understood what this sudden recession of water meant. It had gone somewhere, and it hadn’t just evaporated. One survivor recalled that a few seconds later, he felt his feet begin to shake, then it sounded like the sky was collapsing and the earth was cracking. One worker, referencing an old folk tale, reportedly screamed “The river dragon has come!”
The equivalent of more than a quarter million Olympic sized swimming pools burst through the crumbling dam, sending an unstoppable wave on a collision course with the millions living downstream. It would unleash unimaginable horrors in the minutes, hours and weeks ahead. But this was no mere act of nature. It was a completely preventable disaster that would become a grim lesson in the dangers of engineering hubris and political fanaticism.
But few would get a chance to learn the lessons of the Banqiao Dam collapse. What was the deadliest structural failure in human history, would also become one of the most effectively covered up, on this episode of Manmade Catastrophes.
[Theme Music]
In this series, we’ll explore the lesser-known angles of some of history’s deadliest human follies – some stemming from hubris and incompetence, others from malice and a complete disregard for fellow human beings.
In this inaugural episode, we look at the 1975 collapse of China’s Banqiao Dam – an event so destructive, you’d probably have to go back to Ancient Rome to find a structural failure that left even one-tenth the death toll.
The story of Banqiao starts in 1949. That year, Mao Zedong stood over Tiananmen Square in Beijing and declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, led by his Communist forces that had just emerged victorious in a long civil war.
Between that and the Japanese invasion, China had been battered by a constant state of conflict and upheaval for the better part of two decades. Now, under Mao, it was time not just to rebuild, but build a new China – an industrial and agricultural powerhouse that would mobilize the masses under socialism to outshine the capitalist powers of the West.
But even if the country had possessed all the right technical expertise during this period, the scope of Mao’s ambitions still would have been absurd. But China didn’t yet have that expertise, and Mao would become disdainful, and even vindictive, toward many of the best experts the country did have.
One big focus of the early modernization drive would be the inland province of Henan. Today home to 100 million people, it’s a mountainous region with many wide valleys and several major river systems. Throughout history, it’s been plagued by both flooding and drought, and in the early 1950s, one of its most painful chapters was still fresh in people’s minds.
In 1938, at the height of the war with Japan, Chinese forces under the then-ruling Nationalist government blew up dikes on the Yellow River in Henan in a desperate attempt to stop the advancing Japanese army. The tactic had a small effect in slowing the enemy, but it had absolutely devastating effects on ordinary Chinese in the region for the next decade. River flows were thrown into disarray, vast tracts of farmland were destroyed, and routine floods became bigger and deadlier. Deaths from the direct flooding, as well as the resulting famine and disease, may have numbered in the millions.
Though the dikes were eventually repaired, major floods in Henan’s Huai River basin from 1949 to 1950 further illustrated how vulnerable the region still was to natural disasters. And Mao held the conviction that man could conquer nature.
At the end of 1950, the government kicked off a campaign to Harness the Huai River with dams. The campaign would serve three main purposes, in order of priority: First, build up water stores to be used for agriculture during periods of drought. Second, provide electricity for the country’s industrialization. And third, control flooding.
Over the following decade, more than a hundred dams and reservoirs would be built just in this corner of Henan, under the guidance and technical specifications of Soviet engineers. These specifications placed primacy on water storage, rather than flood control – something that suited China’s agricultural goals just fine.
One of the earliest and largest of these dam projects was Banqiao. Started in 1951 and completed 14 months later, it was what’s known as an embankment dam. These are different than gravity dams, which are often massive walls of concrete. Embankment dams are pyramid-shaped mounds made of piled up earthen materials. Sometimes you don’t even notice these dams, as they’re covered with grass. Banqiao was built with a clay core surrounded by a shell of sand and rock that rose 80 feet to its crest, with a wave protection wall that added about another four feet.
Embankment dams have been used throughout the world for thousands of years, and if built correctly, they can be just as safe as the more modern gravity dams. But the key is, the reservoir’s waters can never be allowed to overtop the dam’s peak. If that happens, it initiates a death spiral. The earthen materials on the surface begin to wash away, allowing even more water to rush over, which erodes the structure further with every second that water flows over it. That accelerating waterflow will slice its way down and eventually cause the dam’s complete disintegration.
In those early years, Banqiao’s reservoir never approached those levels, but almost as soon as construction was completed, it began to show cracks. So from 1955 to 1956 it was repaired and reinforced, again with Soviet specifications, and heightened by another 10 feet. It could now supposedly hold back once-per-millennium floods.
To reflect builders’ confidence in the reinforcements, Banqiao was dubbed “The Iron Dam” in homage to its newfound invincibility. As the magazine Popular Mechanics later put it, it was, you could say, “the Titanic of dams.”
But there was one man who wasn’t impressed: Chen Xing, a hydrologist and the chief engineer of the Henan Water Conservancy Department. He had major concerns about the Banqiao Dam itself, as well as the wider dam-building frenzy unfolding in the province.
He was most concerned that flood prevention was taking a back seat to water storage in the dam-building campaign. He worried that the overbuilding of dams would raise the water table of the whole area to unsafe levels, potentially increasing the risk of catastrophic flooding rather than preventing it. He thought effort should be focused less on building as many dams as possible, and more to flood mitigation efforts like dredging riverbeds, maintaining existing dikes and creating more flood diversions zones – empty areas where water could be temporarily diverted in the event of serious flooding.
But with all the dams going up, patches of land that had previously served as flood diversion zones were becoming permanent reservoirs or even farms and towns populated by people. Chen warned that if there was a catastrophic flooding event or a dam breach, the water would have nowhere to go.
As for the Banqiao dam itself, Chen advised that builders install 12 sluice gates – these are the doors in the dam that open to allow more water to flow through. This number would ensure that if the Banqiao Reservoir were to begin rapidly filling, water could be channeled out the other side before it flooded over the dam’s crest. In the end though, a higher official deemed Chen’s plan too conservative, and only five sluice gates were installed.
In an interview decades later, Chen looked back at how his warnings were rebuffed, saying there were, “some erroneous propositions and erroneous measures, but if I don’t talk about them, no one dares to talk about them. People outside the Communist Party certainly would not talk about them.”
As Chen would soon find out, there was good reason that few dared to throw speed bumps in front of Mao’s industrial ambitions. In 1958, he became one of hundreds of thousands persecuted in one of Mao’s early political purges, the Anti-Rightest Campaign, which sought to dispose of intellectuals thought to oppose socialism. Chen, who had been a wet blanket on the dam-building frenzy for years, was labeled a right-wing opportunist and removed from his position.
Soon after, China descended into one of the most disastrous periods in its history when Mao launched the Great Leap Forward to turbocharge China’s agricultural and industrial output through collectivization and outlandish quotas. Millions of farmers were diverted to industrial projects that were ultimately fruitless. And unscientific, counterproductive farming techniques were introduced across the country in an effort to increase agricultural yields. Virtually anyone with the expertise to recognize these blunders had either been purged from any position of authority or scared into silence. As a result, crop yields plummeted, famine struck and tens of millions starved to death.
The Great Leap Forward catastrophe should have been another red flag for the massive dam-building binge in Henan, which was still ongoing and no less hastily and novicely implemented. But Banqiao and more than a hundred other dams in the region continued to function, on the surface at least, as they were designed to, year by year adding to the false sense of security. But they had yet to be truly tested.
Throughout the 1960s, these ticking timebombs were quietly becoming even more dangerous. The Sino-Soviet split in 1960 ensured that the Russian engineers who’d advised on Henan’s dam projects would no longer be around to lend their expertise on the upkeep of these dams. And in 1966, Mao launched yet another fanatical political movement – one that would dwarf the earlier Anti-Rightest Campaign. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as it was called, sought to purge whatever supposed remnants of capitalism and traditional culture remained in the country.
[Cultural Revolution Propaganda Reel]
In reality though, it became a nationwide witch hunt that pit Communist Party factions against one another, neighbors against neighbors, students against teachers, and even children against parents. It fostered countless, often violent, political struggles that left critical work in the country neglected – work like dam maintenance and meteorology. Toward the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1975, it would all come to head in a literal perfect storm.
* * *
In late July, the storm formed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and began rapidly picking up strength en route to Taiwan. It was upgraded to a tropical storm, given the name Nina, and continued to gain steam until it became a full-blown category 4 violent typhoon, reaching wind speeds of 155 miles per hour.
It hit Taiwan on August 3, killing some two-dozen people and damaging thousands of homes, but it mercifully avoided its most populated areas. It continued through the island’s mountain ranges, weakening significantly by the time it passed over into the Taiwan Strait. It was downgraded back to a tropical storm, but it was far from finished.
On August 4, it made landfall in mainland China, still carrying 60-mile-per-hour winds and dropping heavy rainfall. Storms of this nature usually peter out as they move inland, but not this time. A rare combination of weather phenomena would keep it going.
On August 5, the storm abruptly pivoted northward toward Henan and fell out of radar range for those monitoring it at the Central Meteorological Observatory in Beijing.
Decades later, Chinese state media would say the country’s weather forecasting capabilities were simply too underdeveloped at this time to have predicted what was about to happen, and warn the people of Henan. But one former Henan official, in an interview for a 2012 Phoenix Television documentary, said that under normal circumstances, they should have been able to track the storm from where it fell off Beijing’s radar and take more effective steps to prepare. But, he said, the Henan Provincial Meteorological Bureau was preoccupied with factional struggles amid the Cultural Revolution, so its radar was unmanned.
The Banqiao dam was built to withstand a once-per-one-thousand-years level flood. But now, what would later be deemed a once-per-two-thousand-years event was headed straight for it, and the people living in the region had no idea it was coming.
Nina’s wind speeds had significantly slowed from its peak, but as it moved further inland toward Henan, it converged with separate westward moving storm events that were bringing warm water vapor from the Pacific Ocean, steadily fueling the heavy rainfall. Then, the final piece of the perfect storm fell into place. A cold front from the North effectively created a wall stopping Nina’s northward trajectory. The superstorm was held in place over Henan for three days, battering it with a seemingly endless supply of water.
The rainfall that the Banqiao Dam had been built to withstand under the 1-in-a-thousand-years framework amounted to 12 inches in 24 hours and 21 inches over three days. But Nina dwarfed that. On August 5, it rained 32 inches in just six hours and reached 42 inches within 24 hours. It’s an intensity that’s rarely been recorded anywhere in the world. Witnesses said the rain came down like a fireman’s hose, and that flocks of dead sparrows littered the mountains – pummeled to death by its intensity.
Banqiao’s already high reservoir filled quickly. For four consecutive years, rainfall had been low in the region, and by 1975, officials were seriously concerned about a summer drought. So the dam’s operators had been instructed that year to be very stingy with how much water they released. Making matters worse was the fact that much of the forests in the area had been stripped away over previous years to fuel industrial projects like steel production. This removed a critical buffer that otherwise would have absorbed some of that rainwater running off into the reservoir.
Had dam operators been forewarned about the storm that was coming, they could have preemptively begun to drain the reservoir and possibly averted disaster. But even when rains hit and it became clear that this was no ordinary storm, they still didn’t fully open the sluice gates.
After just the first day of the storm, the Banqiao Reservoir had nearly reached its designed capacity, and those working in the nearby administration building for the dam were already waist-deep in water. The building’s comms room was inundated, and phone lines were down all over the region, interrupting communication – most notably, with other dams and weather stations that could share much needed information, as well as higher officials that could give orders and approve requests. Even the roads were becoming impassable, leaving Banqiao’s operators virtually on their own, aside from some sporadic messages relayed through a patchwork of radio, telegraph and physically running from one location to another.
The next day, on August 6, the second deluge hit, bringing another 16 hours of intense rainfall. Now, Banqiao’s reservoir had risen six feet higher than it was designed to handle. The dam theoretically had capacity to release more than 700 cubic meters of water per second, but the sluice gates were still only opened enough to release 300.
That night, a local official from the nearby town of Banqiao trudged through the water to deliver the dam’s operators a message he’d received from provincial officials. It instructed the dam’s operators to increase the discharge to 400 cubic meters per second – a still laughably inadequate rate.
Even if the sluice gates had been fully opened from the moment the severity of the storm was recognized, it probably wouldn’t have saved the dam. With the speed the reservoir filled, it would have had to release water at many times the rate it was even theoretically capable of. As the hydrologist Chen Xing had warned, the number of sluice gates installed simply wasn’t enough…and even those that existed had been significantly impeded by silt that had built up unchecked over the years. But still, fully opening the gates earlier could have bought precious time to spread warnings and launch evacuations.
A Banqiao technician who was present would later say that, according to operating procedure, they should have fully opened the sluice gates as soon as the reservoir levels reached the dam’s designed limit. But they were paralyzed.
“Without instructions from superiors, who dares call the shots?” the technician said, adding that he’d witnessed similar instances of inaction and silence by low-level leaders on the ground during critical moments in earlier floods. Releasing too much water could have disastrous consequences for those living downstream, who were also getting hit with extreme flooding. And nobody wanted responsibility for a decision like that – particularly at a time when people all around them were being purged, or worse, for far pettier reasons. And at that point, it still seemed unthinkable that the Iron Dam could fail.
The next day, on August 7, the situation was becoming desperate around the region. The third and final deluge of rainfall was unleashed. Dam workers at Banqiao began telling their families living nearby to evacuate. At noon, officials overseeing the dam and the nearby town of Banqiao trudged into a conference room covered in mud and soaked from head to toe to discuss their list of bad options. By this point, technicians had finally opened the sluice gates fully, but it was too late. The water was still rising.
For more than an hour, they argued heatedly. Some said they should focus efforts on piling sandbags to raise the height of the dam, others thought they should use dynamite to create a spillway on the dam’s periphery to release water. But toward the end of the meeting, they got news that their argument was moot. The nearest flood control warehouse sent word that it had no dynamite, no sandbags, no shovels, no timber, no generators – virtually nothing that would be of any use. The list of bad options was dwindled down to a few pathetic ones.
Chen Bin, a prefecture-level official and the highest ranking in attendance, ordered that whatever soldiers could be reached should be dispatched to the dam with whatever equipment they had, and all departments should scrounge whatever materials they could to reinforce the crest of the dam. He also urged other officials to continue exhausting whatever means of communication they could to get word to higher officials.
After the meeting, the county party secretary, Zhu Yongchao, made what was probably the best decision in the three decades of the Banqiao Dam’s existence. He ordered the immediate evacuation of the towns he oversaw, Banqiao and Shahedian, which sat directly downstream. But it wasn’t an easy decision – it was a risky one. The hydrologist Chen Xing would later claim that at this point in the disaster, there were still many leaders saying the danger should not be “excessively publicized,” because it could “disturb the hearts of the people.” Indeed, the people of Banqiao and Shahedian would ultimately be the only ones that received evacuation orders, or really, any warning whatsoever.
At 7pm that evening, a separate emergency meeting was held miles away among higher, prefecture level officials who had more resources at their disposal. They discussed several dams in danger of failing in the region, but Banqiao reportedly wasn’t even mentioned – its reputation as the Iron Dam apparently precluding it as a serious cause for concern. They still hadn’t received word about how perilous its situation was.
By now, the Banqiao reservoir’s waters were just inches from the dam’s crest. An army garrison finally managed to send off a telegram to higher departments, warning that the dam was in danger of failure. But it would be three hours before they got a response.
Around 9pm, seven small dams in the region succumbed to the storm. At 10pm, the medium-sized Zhugou dam gave way. At the same time, water began to spill over Banqiao’s crest.
At ten after 10pm, Banqiao technicians finally got a response to their telegram from the Regional Flood Control Headquarters, but it was a useless one. It gave them permission to open the sluice gates to 450 cubic meters per second – something they’d already done. “Regardless of other impacts, go all out to ensure the safety of the dam,” the message read.
Chen Bin sent one last desperate telegram, requesting that the military fly in bombers to create a spillway on the dam’s periphery.
[Chen Bin message]: “The reservoir is in a state of special crisis. The water level has passed the dam crest and is about to overflow the wave wall. The main and auxiliary spillways have all been used. We must notify the community team to pay attention to emergency water transfer. The flood control headquarters of the reservoir is requesting Air Force support at the South end of the dam.”
But no one would receive that message in time. Soldiers and dam workers heroically stood atop the dam and continued to pile up whatever they could to protect its crest, but it must have been obvious what a hopeless task it was.
At 12:30am, the nearby Shimantan Dam – the second largest in the region after Banqiao – gave way on a separate Huai River tributary. Then just ten minutes later, the absolute worst-case scenario – it was Banqiao’s turn. The water that had been steadily eroding the dam’s crest for nearly three hours finally overpowered it, slicing through from top to bottom, creating 1,000-foot-wide hole in a matter of seconds.
It unleashed a horrific wave. It would take the rest of the night for the Banqiao reservoir to completely drain as it fueled a three-story tall wall of water that would stretch as wide as six miles. It was headed straight for towns and villages where millions laid sleeping, completely unaware of what was careening toward them.
* * *
On the day the dam collapsed, a group of fisherman boarded a fishing tugboat in the Banqiao Reservoir under orders from a superior. With the dam’s sluice gates fully open, it was the perfect time to throw nets in the water to capture fish being swept through the bottleneck. But these men would unwittingly become the first to witness the disaster.
When the dam burst, the boat was sucked downstream riding just behind the head of the massive wave. One of the fisherman, named Chen Zhijia, later recalled that he could see lights from the village ahead of him, and as he was swept closer, he could even hear people’s screams. But then, he said, the world disappeared right before his eyes into the rushing white tides. As he flowed past, the lights and the homes were wiped away beneath him. Then there was nothing but horrifying silence behind him.
But most people that night didn’t even get the chance to scream. They were taken in their sleep, having had no warning of what was coming. The first towns hit – Shahedian and Banqiao – were the only exceptions, thanks to the evacuation order from the county party secretary. That order probably saved thousands of lives. Of Shahedian’s more than 6,000 residents, only about 800 were lost that night – a grim figure for sure, but a much better survival rate than other towns in the wave’s crosshairs that night.
The town of Wencheng was next downstream. It reportedly lost more than half of its 36,000 residents. Then came Daowencheng, which was completely erased in seconds – along with nearly all of its 9,600 residents. One survivor named Wei Chengshuan, from the nearby village of Weiwan, later recounted losing 14 family members in an instant – only one of whom’s body was ever recovered. And it wasn’t only the living who were erased.
Even ancestral graves were uprooted and washed away, along with any documents, photographs or mementos that could attest to these villagers’ existence prior to the deluge. Wei said his history and that of the entire village were instantly set back to zero.
Another survivor from the same village recalled: “The flood overran our village, uprooting the trees and smashing the houses to pieces. All the villagers clinging to the trees and perching on the rooftops were engulfed by the mountainous waves…I was surrounded by a vast sea, with naked human bodies and dead animals floating by.”
The most vulnerable in these towns were children – unable to swim and too weak to cling to anything for dear life. In the places directly in the wave’s path, there were almost no children under 10 years old alive by sunrise.
The wall of water continued tearing through village after village at 30 miles per hour, obliterating anything in its way. The vast network of dams in the region were knocked down one after another like dominoes. Decades of construction, propaganda and promises to harness the Huai River were reduced to rubble in a matter of hours. Altogether, 62 dams that had stood on August 7 were gone by August 8.
As the torrent careened downstream, it snapped trees like toothpicks, yanked out virtually anything with roots, demolished buildings like sandcastles, and carried massive objects like they were toys. Even shipping containers and rail cars were swept miles away. In one case, a 50-ton oil tank was reportedly later found more than 30 miles from where it had started.
People were similarly washed dozens of miles downstream. Some were able to survive by clinging to floating debris, but more often, it was only their lifeless bodies that floated on.
Back at what remained of the Banqiao dam, the workers who’d survived the collapse continued one of the only duties they were still able to carry out, which was to record the water level whenever it rose or fell. After days of recording nothing but steady rises, they now kept walking down lower into the reservoir, setting down stones to mark where the water level was at what time. Apparently, the workers did this in a sort of solemn silence, well aware that every inch the water went down represented more lives being washed away.
Many were submerged and drowned in their homes before they realized what was happening. Others might be sucked into whirlpools or pulled away by tides they had no hope of swimming out of. But drowning was only one method the wave had to eliminate those in its path. Some were killed in collapsing buildings or hit by fast-moving debris in the water. Electrical lines and the polls they were connected to being whipped downriver posed another threat. Some got tangled in these wires, and others were reportedly even dismembered or decapitated by them.
In one town that had already been flooded over the previous days, nearly a hundred people were packed into a single house on high ground that hadn’t yet been inundated. But it couldn’t survive the wave. It was swept away and few inside survived.
Miraculously though, Chen Zhijia, the fisherman who’d had a front-row seat to the disaster, was among those who lived to tell his story. As his boat rode the wave further downstream, it was tossed around and pulled apart. Chen held on desperately to a piece of the boat’s hull, being thrown around violently and ingesting large amounts of water as he continued flailing to stay afloat. Eventually, he washed up on land, barely conscious but still breathing…now many miles away from the dam where he’d started. But his six crewmates were nowhere to be found.
It took five hours for the Banqiao Reservoir to fully empty, and for the wave it had created to finally settle just as the sun was coming up on August 8.
Tens of thousands of people who’d gone to bed healthy the previous night were now dead. But there were millions in the region who’d survived – many of them badly battered and shaken. But they were alive, and perhaps some were even hopeful. As the sun rose, they were no doubt relieved to see the waves dissipate and the rains that had been pounding them for three days finally give way to clear skies. But this tranquility belied the horror that was just beginning.
The three days of record rainfall and 62 collapsed dams in the region had left a flood plain nearly the size of Connecticut. And just as hydrologist Chen Xing had warned more than two decades earlier, that water had nowhere to go.
Many of those who’d survived the initial onslaught would soon wish they hadn’t. The relatively quick deaths of their peers would seem enviable compared to what they were about to endure.
* * *
Many of the people who’d survived Banqiao’s collapse had lost everything, and I mean everything – their families, homes, food, and even the shirts on their back. The flood had tossed some around so violently that it stripped their clothes right off them. It was as if their lives had just been reset, and they were newborns in a new, terrifying world – naked, confused, scared and very vulnerable.
Hundreds of thousands of people were still stuck on rooftops, in trees or on small dry patches surrounded by putrid water as far as the eye could see. And all around them were scenes of horror.
Corpses were everywhere – those of pigs, sheep, cows, horses, chickens, and of course, humans. They were floating in the water, washed up on land, some even dangled upside-down from tree branches. Nearly 30 miles from where the Banqiao Dam had collapsed was one especially grisly scene, where dozens of bodies had washed up in a long ditch beside railroad tracks. One soldier later reported that so many flies had descended on the spot that the overhanging tree branches were drooped downwards by their weight.
And now, the weather was yet again making things even worse. Three straight days of darkness and constant rain had now flipped to inescapable sunlight and sweltering heat that would reach 97 degrees Fahrenheit.
People were stuck with no food, no clean water, no medicine, no protection from the glaring sun and they were surrounded by the rapidly decomposing bodies of humans and all manner of livestock. And help wasn’t coming any time soon.
By this point, hydrologist Chen Xing had been rehabilitated politically and everyone could see how right he’d been in his warnings years earlier. Five days after the dam collapse, Chen accompanied a vice premier to survey the disaster by helicopter. What he saw confirmed his worst fears. What should have been flood diversion zones had been made into permanent reservoirs or cities, so the flood waters had now settled into place with nowhere to drain. Chen described flying over southern Henan and seeing what looked like a vast ocean below him, with only small sporadic islands dotting it. When he flew in closer to those islands, he could see they were each packed with dozens, sometimes hundreds of survivors. Some of these patches were so densely packed that people on the edges had no choice but to stand knee deep in water, or sit up in trees.
But there was little the government could do at this point. Roads and rail lines would remain flooded for weeks, and communications lines to the inundated towns would remain down as well. What few helicopters and boats existed were dwarfed by the scale of rescue operations needed to help the nearly 2 million people thought to still be imperiled in the region.
As the days went on, conditions deteriorated rapidly. When possible, the corpses of humans and livestock were taken away in vehicles, but more often, people had to try to bury them in shallow graves where they were found. Some resorted to burning bodies with gasoline because they lacked the tools or the energy to bury them. But for many, neither burial nor cremation were options – the living just had to co-exist with the dead that were rapidly decaying in the rancid water or out in the scorching heat.
Between filthy water, rotting food, decaying bodies, and the flies and mosquitoes that descended upon them, disease spread uncontrollably. Survivors had to contend with a witch’s brew of dysentery, typhoid, hepatitis, malaria, influenza, enteritis, pink eye, food poisoning, and infected wounds – and the punches just kept coming.
In one town, a two-story health clinic had survived the wave, weakened but still standing. Being one the only medical facilities still intact in the area – and one of the only standing buildings period – more sick, desperate survivors crammed in every day. Eventually, it became too much and the building collapsed, killing yet more people.
A week after the Banqiao had collapsed, there were still an estimated 1.7 million people trapped in the region. Some started resorting to eating tree bark and leaves. Military planes tried airdropping food, medicine, and other supplies, but much of it fell in the water and was lost – or worse, consumed after it had rotted in the filthy water.
At this point, starvation was setting in for many survivors, and some were losing all hope. So yet another cause of death was added to the growing list: suicide. In one village, three elderly men were reported to have hanged themselves because they had no food and wanted to end their suffering.
After his helicopter survey, Chen Xing and other officials traveled to Beijing to brief some of the country’s highest officials on the situation. Chen advised that one of the only things they could do at that point was blow up a few more of the dams and embankments that sat more than a hundred miles downstream from Banqiao, so that at least some of the water would have somewhere to drain. The measure would mean even more destruction for the towns downstream from those dams, and even more deaths for those who failed to evacuate, but leaders agreed it had to be done. And so it was, and some of the flooded areas got relief.
More than two weeks after Banqiao fell, the waters started to dissipate and even more devastation was revealed. More rubble from once bustling cities and more mounds of bodies. Some were still posed in positions that testified to their last horrifying moments. A few were still clinging to bundles of straw or other objects they’d used to try staying afloat. One deceased woman was reportedly still holding her lifeless baby tightly to her chest.
Many began arduous treks in search of help through the vast wasteland and a constant, nauseating stench. Stray dogs, which were just as weakened and desperate as the humans, milled about feeding on the corpses of animals and humans alike. Survivors reportedly began taking care of where they slept so that these dogs wouldn’t mistake them for a corpse and begin gnawing on them.
Eventually, military personnel made it into the most affected areas with aid. Though the immediate dangers were alleviating, the disaster would have long-lasting effects. Diseases brought about by the floods, and the flies and mosquitoes that spread them, were still ubiquitous enough that military planes blanketed the region with 250 tons of insecticide. It’s unclear what effect this had on the epidemics, or on the people exposed to these chemicals.
Millions of acres of farmland was also destroyed, along with some five million homes…leaving many with no reason to stay in the region.
Banqiao refugees fanned out across the country, impoverished and desperate – their livelihood and all their possessions wiped out. Migrants from Henan had already begun to develop a bad reputation around China as thieves, cheats, and petty criminals not to be trusted, thanks in part to earlier disasters like the Yellow River floods of the 1930s and 40s. The influx of beleaguered refugees from yet another flood disaster only enflamed these stereotypes. To this day, people from Henan still face heavy discrimination throughout the rest of China – partly a legacy of the Banqiao disaster.
But as they tried to move on from the catastrophe, it’s likely that many of those who’d lived through it directly didn’t quite understand it or have any idea how big its scale truly was.
In the days and weeks after the collapse, newspapers in China contained stories about the floods in Henan, but they focused on heroic rescue efforts by the People’s Liberation Army, as well as the handful of dams they had managed to save. The Banqiao, Shimantan, and other dams that had failed received no mention whatsoever, nor did the massive number of casualties. Unless they heard through word of mouth, the people of Henan received no official explanation as to how a tsunami had struck them 500 miles from the nearest ocean.
Zhang Guangyou, a reporter for the state-run Xinhua news agency who was present for the disaster and would later write a book about it, said he was ordered by superiors not to make any reports on the events. He was later told this was because it could trigger a public panic, as well as upset Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai, both of whom were in poor health and would die the following year. It isn’t clear whether either leader was ever informed about the extent of the disaster.
For the 2012 Phoenix Television documentary, one meteorological official who’d been on the front lines at Banqiao said he was never explicitly told by higher officials to keep the dam failures and the scale of the disaster secret. At that time, it just went without saying, he explained. Covering up deadly disasters – particularly manmade ones that could be blamed on government – was just par for the course.
Certainly, no one would dare point out that the catastrophe was rooted in the central government’s amateurish dam building campaign and Mao’s incompetent industrial and political imperatives. On the contrary, an internal government report that was distributed a month after the disaster proclaimed that, “One of the lessons learned from the collapse of the reservoir is to learn from the writings of Marxism-Leninism and Chairman Mao.”
But no one outside a select group of high-ranking Communist Party officials would see reports like that for 30 years. And it would be more than a decade before much of any information on the horrors that Henan experienced in 1975 began to trickle out.
A few months after the disaster, the Minister of Water Resources Qian Zhengying gave an apologetic speech at a conference on dam safety in the provincial capital of Henan. Of course, she laid no blame on the root political issues that led to the dam collapses, but she did give a reasonably thorough accounting of the proximate technical causes and human errors during the crisis. And she actually took responsibility for them.
[Qian Zhengying]: “Responsibility for the collapse of the Banqiao and Shimantan dams lies with the Ministry of Water Resources and Electric power. And I personally must shoulder the principal responsibility for what has happened. We did not do a good job. There was a failure to establish clear lines of authority and leadership during the crisis. We should be held accountable for this”
But Qian’s contrition appears to be the extent of official accountability, at least that’s been made public. It isn’t known which officials were punished and to what extent for the decisions that led to the disaster. If Qian actually was principally responsible as she said, her career didn’t seem to suffer for it. She kept her post for another 13 years then held other high government positions until her retirement in 2003. More likely, she was just a proverbial face of contrition meant to put the matter to rest.
In 1976, Chairman Mao died and within a few years, the more moderate Deng Xiaoping came to power. He launched what was called Reform and Opening up, and China began to move away from totalitarianism. But the Banqiao disaster still officially remained a secret.
In 1979, a thorough investigation into the disaster was completed by a local branch of the Ministry of Water Resources, but again, it was only circulated among select Communist Party leaders.
By the mid-1980s, China was starting to grapple with some of the disasters that had occurred during Mao’s reign, and some things that had been unspeakable a decade earlier were becoming less taboo. Between 1985 and 1989, a number of accounts on the Banqiao disaster started to appear in limited-circulation books and journals, mostly related to hydropower technology. In the late 80s, it was becoming a hot topic once again as debate started to rage over the proposed Three Gorges Dam project on China’s Yangtse River.
Among these articles was one published by eight elite Communist Party members with engineering expertise, who opposed the massive project. The eight authors were all members of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, or CPPCC. It’s the highest-level government advisory body, which has no legislative power, but is highly respected domestically and made up of some of the most influential Party faithful in the country.
In their article, they warned that the Three Gorges Dam would be 40 times larger than the Banqiao and Shimantan dams combined, and that if it were to ever collapse, it could cause unimaginable losses.
The most striking part of their article was the claim that 230,000 people had died in the Henan disaster. They didn’t cite a source for this number, but as high-ranking Party officials, they presumably would have had access to earlier internal reports not available to the public.
Like with most such catastrophes, the death toll would become a point of controversy. Just 12 days after the dams collapsed in 1975, the Henan Provincial Party Committee made a preliminary estimate that 85,600 people had been killed – an estimate that was sent on to central government officials in Beijing. They said they believed it to be reasonably accurate, but given the state of communication and general state of disarray the region was still in at this point, this was probably little more than a very rough estimate. And obviously, it would have been far too early to account for all the ongoing deaths from famine, disease, exposure and suicide.
But there wouldn’t be a more thorough count – at least, one that was ever made public. The Zhumadian Prefectural Committee would later say it did not advocate doing a one-by one-headcount of the dead, as it could enflame public grief.
The 85,600 figure was repeated in a 1989 book written by Ministry of Water Resources officials, which had a limited circulation of 1,500 copies sent to relevant government officials. But curiously, in 1992 – shortly before the National People’s Congress voted on whether to approve the Three Gorges Dam – a second edition of the book was published with an amended death toll. It said simply that, “26,000 drowned.” It made no mention of other causes of death, but an out of sequence footnote at the end of the book said that, “the figure of 85,600 dead…which appeared in Volume 1, was an error.” There was no explanation of this discrepancy. Yet, 26,000 became the de facto official death toll that would be repeated in state media from that point on.
A pair of Xinhua reporters who’d been dispatched to Henan after the disaster to compile internal reports estimated that more than 30,000 had been killed in the initial collapse, but not more than 40,000. They said the 85,000 figure was obviously too much based on their observations.
Other estimates placed the number higher though. A pair of researchers who wrote a book called The History of Famines in China from 1949 to 1989” estimated that 100,000 were killed just in the initial dam collapses – a number also backed by two researchers at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The official 26,000 estimate could only have included those killed in the initial collapse, but even then, it seems a fancifully low estimate. Given the populations of the towns immediately in the wave’s path that were completely obliterated, it seems very likely the initial onslaught killed far more than 26,000, not to mention all those who died unnaturally over the following weeks.
Government estimates said there were some 10 million people in the vicinity of the floods, around 4 million of which were directly in their path. Given how so many of these people were stuck in apocalyptic conditions for weeks being battered by hunger, thirst, heat, and disease, the high estimate of 230,000 killed between both the initial deluge and its aftermath may not be so farfetched.
If true, that would put the Henan catastrophe on par with China’s 1976 Tangshan Earthquake or the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami – making it not only the deadliest technological failure ever, but also one of the greatest disasters of any kind in the 20th century. But like most disasters of the Mao era, we’ll probably never know the true toll.
Uncertainty over the death toll aside, we do know much more today about the Banqiao collapse than we did even 20 years ago. In the 1990s, more detailed accounts were published, most notably a thorough report featuring survivor testimony by investigative journalist Yi Si, as well as a full page article in the Henan Daily Newspaper on the event’s 20th anniversary. Then, on the 30th anniversary in 2005, the disaster was finally officially okay to talk about nationwide.
Some government reports were declassified, new books were published, documentaries appeared on state television, and a major conference was held with Chinese and international engineers on dam safety. Then, in 2012 came the highest-level acknowledgement of the disaster from then-Premier Wen Jiabao. An outspoken critic of unrestrained dam building, Wen cited the Banqiao and Shimantan dams by name and said, “this painful lesson must not be forgotten.”
But to most, that lesson has been forgotten – or never learned in the first place.
Banqiao is not sensitive topic in China today – certainly not in the way events like Tiananmen Square, or the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution are. Topics like these are heavily censored on China’s internet, but information on the 1975 disaster can now be freely searched within the Great Firewall, as it’s called. Domestically, it’s known as the 75.8 Disaster, referring to August, 1975. And if you do search, there are plenty of articles and videos discussing Banqiao – some of them very critical of government actions at the time.
However, the disaster isn’t actively taught or publicized. There was that brief raft of articles and documentaries in 2005 and a few more over the following years during a relatively open period for Chinese media. But today, the Banqiao disaster is very rarely mentioned or even alluded to in media or entertainment, and it isn’t taught in school textbooks.
Ask anyone in China outside of Henan about the disaster – or even those from Henan under 40 – and you’ll most likely get blank stares. The same goes for people around the world. Disasters like Chernobyl and Bhopal have high recognition internationally, but I’ll bet you never learned about Banqiao in school or flipped past a dramatic History Channel reenactment of it. This is despite the fact that, even by the most conservative estimates, the Henan disaster was many multiples deadlier than either Chernobyl or Bhopal.
Unlike those events, it was possible to keep the Banqiao disaster hidden for a long time. There was no chemical or radiation leak that spread to other countries, and even by the standards of 1975 China, Henan was extremely isolated and poor. There were hardly any foreign diplomats, journalists, or businessmen there to speak of. And refugees from the disaster may have spread throughout China in the aftermath, but they were thousands of miles from any foreign border, and very few had the means to travel or communicate with anyone abroad.
And of course, the government’s control of domestic media was absolute – even tighter than that of the Chernobyl-era Soviet Union. So it’s maybe no surprise that there’s hardly a trace of the event in any media or journals outside of China until the 1990s. Even many of those who lived through the disaster directly didn’t know they’d experienced anything more than a particularly bad flood.
Because the Banqiao collapse was so thoroughly hidden for 30 years, it’s perhaps no surprise that it failed to ever find a place in Chinese historical memory or in the international imagination. And that’s to everyone’s detriment.
In the years since Banqiao, warnings that similar mistakes are being made from those who do remember the disaster have mostly fallen on deaf ears. Most famously, the Three Gorges Dam was built against strong protest from many even within the Communist Party over a raft of environmental, social, and safety concerns.
Later, a lesser-known dam building campaign started to take shape in Southwest China. After dam skeptic Premier Wen Jiabao left office in 2013, developers sought to make up for lost time and undertook more than 100 major dam projects in the region – again, against major concerns from environmentalists and foreign engineers warning of safety risks, such as a potential domino scenario like that which befell the 62 dams in Henan in 1975.
Today, China has tens of thousands of dams – possibly more than the rest of the world combined. And even domestic officials have warned that many of them are very old and in poor condition – and that there are simply too many to oversee adequately.
Zhou Fangping, an official from the Guangdong Water Resources Department, told China Economic Weekly as much in a 2011 interview.
[Zhou Fangping]: “There are so many endangered dams. We have so many rivers to manage and so many irrigation and water conservancy projects. If there’s only one project, we can handle it, but there are so many. So the result is either we promise to complete all the projects but we don’t actually meet the targets, or we finish them all but with sub-standard quality.”
Dams aside, mistakes in flood control that Henan experienced in 1975 have also been repeated. When major floods hit Beijing in 2012, many were killed because they lived in areas that had previously been flood diversion zones. Years without any majors flooding events had placated some officials enough that they couldn’t resist developing on the unused, low-lying land.
The Banqiao dam itself was later rebuilt, starting in 1987 and completed in 1993 – this time as a taller, and much more sophisticated structure, with a reservoir 34 percent larger than the original.
Nearby, there’s a small memorial to the events of 1975 created by the Henan Water Resources Department and Huai River Water Resources Commission. On the back, a brief passage gives some statistics on the dam’s history and the amount of flooding in 1975. Then, it acknowledges the human toll.
[Memorial engraving]: “It was during a period called ‘ten years of turmoil’ when ineffective rescue was provided, so lives and properties of tens of thousands of people were taken away, which was a tragic upheaval…We are held responsible for eliminating flood damage and facilitating water conservancy projects in order to protect the general public and their properties. This note is here to help us remember this lesson for life.”
This episode was based on numerous English and Chinese language sources, both state-run and independent. Some of the most notable were a documentary by Phoenix Television, features by Southern Metropolis Daily, Sina, Popular Mechanics, and independent journalist Yi Si, as well as the book The River Dragon Has Come by Dai Qing. For links to these and other sources, go to our website at manmadecatastrophes.com. Thanks for listening.
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