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Tackling the threats from floods along Yellow River
Print Edition
Looking back, it seems to Zhang Bo that his father spent his whole life building houses.
“Every summer, my father would worry that our roof would leak and the flood would hit the village at night,” said Zhang, Party chief of Caolou Village, which sits next to the Yellow River, in Guide Subdistrict in Jinan, capital of east China’s Shandong Province.
For farmers like Zhang, the Yellow River, dubbed the Mother River of China, has long nourished the land, but it has also brought floods that have damaged their houses.
“My father has built four houses during his life, after the old ones were damaged by floodwater,” Zhang said.
Zhang’s hometown is located in the floodplain between the main channel and high levees. In Shandong, more than 600,000 people live in the floodplain of the Yellow River, which covers about 1,700 square kilometers.
Data from the Yellow River conservancy authorities show that the river’s floodplain in Shandong has suffered 48 floods since 1950, affecting 12,300 villages and approximately 6.65 million residents. The area of flooded farmland totals nearly 787,300 hectares.
Many on the floodplains have spent heavily on rebuilding their houses and have had to borrow money, which has become their fundamental cause of poverty. To make matters worse, as soon as their debts are cleared, the river floods again.
In order to protect the local residents from flooding and lift them out of poverty, a relocation-and-reconstruction plan was launched in August 2017, to be completed by 2020. It involved the relocation of people from the floodplains in Shandong, including the cities of Jinan, Zibo, Dongying, Jining, Tai’an, Binzhou and Heze, and the construction of new houses in safer locations.
Liu Yue’e, 43, a villager from Juancheng County in Heze, gave up on the idea of rebuilding her old house in the floodplain after hearing of the government’s relocation plan. In November 2019, residents of 1,116 households from six villages in Dongkou Town of Juancheng, including Liu, moved to the relocation site — Yellow River Community.
“We are satisfied. The new building is comfortable,” Liu said.
Now, Liu makes wigs in a workshop near her home, while her son studies in the town and her husband works in the coastal city of Qingdao in Shandong.
She said her family’s dream of a brand new life has come true.
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