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CrankyStinkman t1_j5pmqc9 wrote

Reply to comment by Fluxmuster in The Key to California’s Survival Is Hidden Underground The state is ping-ponging between severe drought and catastrophic flooding. The solution to both? Making the landscape spongier. by Sariel007

China figured it out 1500 years ago with their monsoon flooding. Fuck tons of canals.

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MrMissus t1_j5pyqn9 wrote

I'm pretty sure Chinese cities have catastrophic flooding happen to them all the time because of a significant lack of infrastructure.

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CrankyStinkman t1_j5q7peo wrote

Yeah, I don’t think that those canals were maintained and expanded across multiple regime changes.

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tankerdudeucsc t1_j5q9cfo wrote

Well the most famous one was the dam that they built. 3 gorges dam that helped with the Yangtze River problems.

So maybe not 1500 years but they do build infrastructure faster than the US.

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CrankyStinkman t1_j5qbmdl wrote

The canals were built during the Warring States period, somewhat ironically the footprint of the canal system overlaps with the 3 gorges dam.

The Chinese have been with flooding for a long time, many historians believe that dealing with flooding was the key driver that led to the development of centralized governmental bodies in ancient China.

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Locha6 t1_j5swfqw wrote

Didn’t they also have over 250,000 deaths when many, many dams collapsed like dominos?

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[deleted] t1_j5sxosr wrote

[deleted]

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Words_Are_Hrad t1_j5t5aqa wrote

>250k people or dams 1500 years ago

China's population during the warring states period ~2500 years ago was ~40 million. And the oldest dams in the world date back ~5000 years ago. Hard to imagine China not having dams 1500 years ago.

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