I wonder if China did something dumb to their ecology and geology? There were big floods a year or two ago near the 3 Gorges Dam as well that "appeared" to cause a partial structural failure on the dam. Did they strip their mountains?
I know in my neck of the woods, the trees were all cut in the late 1800s, early 1900s. The really old folks used to say how we got several inches of rain one weekend, and the mountainsides didn't slow or absorb water because they were stripped of all vegetation. All the water slammed into our holler's little creek at the same time. That spring-fed creek in our valley here is typically 6inches to 1.5 feet deep, but during the rain storm it swelled to over 15ft deep.
Perhaps something similar is occurring in China?
