A 100-meter stretch of the Yangtze River embankment in east China's Anhui province collapsed yesterday. The accident occurred yesterday in the marshlands near the river outside the city of Wuhu and resulted in more than 6,000square meters of land falling into the river. About ten warehouses belonging to a shipyard, a few cranes and a barge fell in the water. No casualties were reported but an elderly couple was rescued from the barge before it toppled into the river. Hu Guangjin, an official with the Wuhu Yangtze River Waterway Administration, said the c...

Local authorities declared a navigation safety alert yesterday as the result of the low water level in the Yangtze River which was caused by the worst autumn drought in 50 years. The announcement came after a cargo ship was grounded on the river on Wednesday evening, disrupting traffic for nearly 40 hours. The "yellow warning", the second highest level, was sent out bythe Yangtze River Maritime Safety Administration for a 680-kilometer stretch of the waterway in the river's upper reaches. The administration urged local authorities to send more staff to c...

As researchers reported, the rare river dolphin has not been spot for 6 weeks. The river dolphin also known as the baiji, seems to be extinct. But according to baiji,org, a group that seeks to protect the dolphin, leading baiji researcher Wang Ding from the Institute of Hydrobiology, Wuhan, said "he could not give a 100 percent confirmation since the video was of poor quality and taken from a distance of about 1000 metres away." Nevertheless, the discovery of a surviving baiji would not be unexpected. Experts have declared the species "functionally ext...

600 people were killed, about 90 million people were affected and 440,000 houses were brought down by the floods and other natural disasters in the reaches of the Yangtze River in its May-October flood season, according to water authorities.The disasters caused direct economic loss of 43.4 billion yuan (5.8 billion U.S. dollars). Chongqing, a major city along the Yangtze River, experienced its worst storm in more than a century on July 17 when precipitation of up to 350 millimeters fell in 24 hours in certain areas. Floodwater inundated most of the munic...

Yesterday, the temporary dam, used during the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, was blasted. The largest hydroelectric project of the world has started to withstand the full force of the Yangtze River.The 2309-meter-long Three Gorges Dam now takes effect its role in controlling the floods which have regularly destoried the farming heartland along the Yangtze River in China. The 12-second series of blasts sent the 90-foot top section of the temporary cofferdam tumbling into the river, and the blast created 6,709,040 cubic feet of concrete fragments, ...