With the sluice gates closing down and the water level in the reservoir rising steady, the Three Gorges Project, the world’s largest water control project, is expected to bring initial benefits soon.

Between zero hour and 9:20 a.m. on June 1, the gates of 19 of the 22 water diversion holes at the bottom of the Three Gorges dam, located on the upper reaches of China’s longest river Yangtze, were closed one by one. The water level in the reservoir, which went up to 106 meters that morning, will reach 135 meters in two weeks.

Although the entire Three Gorges Project will not be completed until 2009, it will start to play an important role in flood control, power generation, navigation, water diversion and environmental protection this year, Chinese experts say.

The 193-km-long Three Gorges, consisting of the Qutang Gorge, Wuxia Gorge and Xiling Gorge, is famed for steep terrain and picturesque landscape. The Yangtze River, after running all the way through the narrow gorges, helped turn the plains along its middle and lower reaches into China’s most fertile land, but at the same time also frequently haunted local residents with devastating floods. The latest Yangtze flooding in the summer of 1998 claimed some 1,000 lives and caused losses in tens of billions of dollars.

To effectively control floodwater flowing down from the upper reaches of the Yangtze has been a long-cherished dream of the Chinese. It also turned out to be the greatest motivation for the Chinese government to begin constructing the gigantic Three Gorges Project in 1994.

During the impending flood season, the Three Gorges reservoir will be able to store some 2.3 to 3.1 billion cubic meters of Yangtze floodwater by adjusting the water level between 135 and 140 meters. When its water level reaches 175 meters as designed in 2009, the reservoir will boast a floodwater storage capacity of 22.15 billion cubic meters. As a result, the Yangtze embankments in the most flood-prone Jingjiang section, which now could only stand severe flooding seen once a decade, will be able to cope with devastating floods occurring once every 100 years. By that time, the affluent Jianghan Plain and Dongting Lake Plain in central China, which are home to some 15 million people, will be forever relieved of the agonies inflicted by frequent flooding.

Power generators would start two months later, and by the end of the year, a total of 5.5 billion kilowatt of electricity will be produced. Shanghai is expected to be the first beneficiary of the Project. Major Chinese cities and industrial bases in more than 20 provinces will benefit from the electricity.