Chapter 12 Chapter 5 The Warm Smell of High Buildings and Crypts

In the phenomenon of human beings and nature, many contradictory things that seem irrelevant have inseparable related factors.For example, life and death, abundance and poverty, prosperity and decline, according to the dialectical point of view, they are both contradictions and unity, and they influence and transform each other.From a macro perspective, there is no real who is good and who is bad.What nature pursues is a balance full of vitality.Sometimes, then, death is better than life, poverty is no worse than abundance, and prosperity may be worse than decline.Today, approaching the 21st century, this contrarian theory proposed by human engineers is increasingly regarded by many insightful people as "the truth to save the earth".

The views of political leaders and economists in all developing countries are exactly the opposite. China is the natural representative of this view, consciously or unconsciously. One of the reasons is that its development speed exceeds that of any "third world" nation.After the historic turning point of the "October Storm" in 1976, when the second revolution of "encircling the city from the countryside" was completed on a land of 9.6 million square kilometers, the rapid urbanization became the "four modernizations" of China. center point". From 1978 to 1994, the number of cities in China grew from 247 to more than 500, and the growth rate more than doubled. Its speed was faster than any time in history, and it also surpassed any country in the world.

China is marching toward urbanization. Urbanization has greatly promoted the country's economic prosperity, but it has also brought difficulties that cannot be shaken off.For example, the dense population has caused traffic congestion, water, electricity, housing tension and environmental pollution and so on.In addition, there is another problem that belongs to the research blank of urban scientists, but the situation is becoming more and more prominent, which is the geological environmental disaster that makes the city face the doomsday!Ordinary people and mayors seem to have never been in contact with this unfamiliar term, but it quietly broke into the mayor's office and residential buildings...

In August 1985, typhoon No. 9 blew past and a heavy rain blew, which was nothing special for the coastal city of Dalian.In the mayor's meeting room where the central government is discussing the further development of Dalian's spirit, the mayor and deputy mayors left their seats one after another after the rain, and opened the closed glass windows... The sea breeze blew on the face with a moist breath , how comfortable!The mayors were in high spirits, but several telephones in the office next door suddenly rang: ——"Hey, is it the mayor's office? Oh, it's terrible! Our entire warehouse here is tens of centimeters down to the beach, the asphalt surface on the top of the warehouse is cracked, and the slope retaining wall has a hundred Domi collapsed..."

——"Hey, Mayor Wang? I want to find him! What, a meeting? Oh, it's about to collapse, what kind of meeting is there? You tell him, the few buildings of our woolen sweater factory and sportswear factory It is covered by rocks and soil, and there are cracks everywhere inside and outside the factory area, send a rescue team quickly, or people will die if it is too late!" ——"Damn, what is the official doing, why is the phone line always busy? You ask who I am? I am your grandfather! What, I curse? Yes, I will curse! My house collapsed and the wall collapsed, and I was almost dead , you officials still care about the life and death of our people?"

"What's going on?" The mayors rushed into the office from the conference room in panic. "For some reason, I received five calls in ten minutes, all of which reported that houses were severely cracked and collapsed in the urban area." The secretaries, who were sweating profusely, replied. "God, is it an earthquake!" Someone said something, and the entire city government building was in chaos. "Run - there's an earthquake!" It doesn't matter if the city government makes such a fuss, the people of the entire seaside city struggled for more than ten hours a day.In the middle of the night, many people still dare not enter the house to sleep.

The terrible earthquake did not happen, but the fear of the disaster among the mayor and the citizens did not decrease in the slightest.The next day, the leaders of the city government organized an investigation team of more than 30 people and came to the scene of the accident. The scene at the scene was indeed shocking: the gigantic mountain was displaced, cracks appeared in the walls of reinforced concrete buildings, one after another residential houses and factory buildings slid down the slope, the old man was burning incense, Children are crying, and middle-aged people are at a loss moving the furniture in the house...

"Mayor, please come up with a solution for us, this cliff is about to collapse!" "I have lived here for decades. There were not so many buildings on this slope before, and I have never seen mountains collapse. For some reason, there have been more buildings in recent years, and the land master seems to be overwhelmed. crooked, it's frightening!" The residents gathered around the mayors to complain. Mayors are not know-it-alls after all.They were also a little confused about the sudden city-wide landslide. "A few days ago, an engineer from the Geological Department came to the city government and said that there was a report on the relationship between the city government's construction and engineering geology to report. You might as well invite him to talk about it." Someone said to the mayor.

"Call him quickly! Don't be absent." The mayor said to his colleagues in an orderly tone. The meeting lasted a whole day.The introduction of the geological engineer stunned all the "parents" in Dalian: Dalian is a coastal and hilly city, and 70% of the entire urban area is on slopes with frequent rock mass activities and extremely unstable mountains.This kind of mountain belongs to the Quaternary Upper Pleistocene geologic age structure, and its brownish-yellow and brownish-yellow sub-clay has large pores, and is prone to landslides under the action of rainwater erosion and external forces.At present, there are 26 dangerous areas that have been found, and they have increased sharply in recent years, and the speed is directly proportional to the municipal construction.By the year 2000, 40,010 industrial and mining enterprises, residential buildings, and public facilities in Dalian will face the risk of bunkers and landslides, and the resulting economic losses are expected to account for about 20% of the city's economic income.

"Is it so serious?" Some people doubted this. This is science, not unfounded conjecture.Geological engineers cited a famous precedent: California, the western United States, has many similarities with Dalian in its urban mountain structure.Geologists have spent three years predicting the losses caused by earthquakes, landslides, mountain erosion, ground subsidence, tsunamis and other disasters that will occur in the state now and in the next 30 years. The result is that California will have 55 billion US dollars. The economy is swallowed for nothing.To this end, the state has used a cost of 6 billion US dollars to take various preventive measures to ensure California's economy.

"It seems that while speeding up the construction, we should seriously study the environmental disasters. Otherwise, a new city built with hard work will be buried in the crypt within a few days!" , felt the seriousness of the problem. In fact, Dalian is not the only city suffering from persistent diseases!According to the survey of relevant departments, one-third of the cities in our country are in danger of disappearing from the earth at any time.This statement is by no means sensational. Panzhihua, my country's iron and steel base that people are familiar with and world-famous, is a typical example.Pangang is almost a synonym for the original name of Dukou City.This is also the case.With Panzhihua Iron and Steel, there is this city, and this city is also Panzhihua Iron and Steel.I had been there fifteen years ago.At that time, a few photojournalists and I squatted in the grass opposite the steel city all night in order to photograph the steel city where the lights of thousands of houses were dimmed.We are excited by the majestic steel city on the other side of the Jinsha River.However, disaster experts told me that under the foot of the No. 1 steel city in southwestern my country is a large active fault zone that may cause landslides and ground cracks at any time, and the entire steel city is almost entirely on a large slope with a slope of 45 degrees.According to scientific research, almost 60% to 70% of such slopes will experience major landslides.Although it is not certain when the catastrophe will occur, the landslide exists forever like a crouching beast, and is looking for opportunities. Once the time is right, it will be furious and open its sails.At that time, the steel city, which the country has invested tens of billions of dollars in, will be buried in the raging Jinsha River Canyon in an instant... What a frightening "idea", and what is even more frightening is that this is not an idea!Now, Panzhihua City has spent more than 100 million yuan to prevent this terrible incident from happening.However, the mountains don't appreciate it, they are still restless, spying, waiting for the opportunity... In Chongqing, Nanjing, Guiyang, Qingdao, which have a population of more than one million... this kind of fate exists at the same time.Maybe telling the people the terrible information will cause panic in the city, but if you don't tell the people, what will happen if the catastrophe is imminent? In the history of ancient and modern China and foreign countries, the tragic fate of those cities standing on the mountain is too numerous to enumerate. Just like cancer is born in the human body, no matter how powerful and wealthy people are, they cannot escape the death of the disease. doom.In the same way, no matter how modern a city is, it will always be a coward in front of nature.There are several mountain cities in the world that can be compared with Los Angeles in the United States, but what about Los Angeles?It still surrendered obediently in front of the famous Huada Mountain.In recent decades, the city has spent more than one billion dollars on mudslide control alone.Compared with the landslides and collapses that take place under the direct pull of the earth's rock mass, mud and rock can only be regarded as the "old nine".Once a powerful landslide and collapse occurs, the momentum to destroy the entire city is as easy and easy as a stevedore throwing off a bag of cotton wool on his back.There was such a "performance" in a certain city in Zhongou Rui. Naturally, the whole city was destroyed, and the death toll was more than 5,000. An American engineer said: "Every hillside is like a knife hanging over a person's head. If there is a slight disturbance, you will pay the price in blood." God finds it inconceivable that smart human beings are still playing child's play in the face of the price of blood: the mountain city is still extending and expanding, and the high-rise buildings are still rising...just as all parts of the world (especially those advanced industrial countries in the West) are investing huge amounts of money. When the funds are used to deal with and do everything possible to contain the disaster, many places in China are still mobilizing millions of construction troops to build new cities on one mountain after another full of hidden dangers. For example, Badong County in Hubei was relocated because of the Three Gorges Project. The new site was actually chosen in an ancient city. On the landslide, some people compare this to "smearing gold on the dung, knowing that it will not get better, but someone wants to do it"!No wonder Zhu Xun, the current Secretary-General of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and the former Minister of Geology and Mining, said: "Geological and natural disasters are terrible, but the disasters of people who lack scientific acumen but have the will of the chief in everything are even more terrible!" Several brand-new buildings rose on the landslide, and after that, more buildings and mansions will appear... The whole country is not just like Patong City! Those cities that are far away from the mountains and have spent thousands of years on the plains "safely and securely", if they think that their destiny is full of sunshine and vitality, it is a big mistake. ——The ancient city of Xi'an.One day, the residents suddenly discovered that on the roads in the most prosperous areas of the city, there were thin and unfathomable cracks like silk screens.Several scheming cadres of the neighborhood committee found a leather pipe, connected one end to the water faucet, and stuffed the other end into a seam in the ground.The tap water has been running for a long time, and there is no sign of "filling up" in the cracks.They went to the leaders of the city government in a panic... For this reason, Xi'an City spends more than one million yuan of investment every year to "fill" these cracks and cause building losses, and the psychological fear caused by this to the citizens is beyond calculation. .More than 5 million citizens are trembling every day in the face of these ground cracks, they can't figure out what's going on! ——Jiangcheng Wuhan.The stories here are the most legendary and thrilling. On September 20, 1977, 1,500 tons of coal and 600 tons of steel billets were placed on the stockyard of the Zhongnan Steel Rolling Plant in Yingwu Prefecture, Hanyang.But the next day, several duty officers in the field department suddenly found that the coal and steel billets as high as a small hill had disappeared!One day ten years later, a house in the residential area of ​​the rolling mill disappeared without a trace from the ground in an instant! ——Tai'an City, Shandong Province.A train from Jinan to Xinhuan came to Tai'an Station from Dahe, a small station 10 kilometers away, on time.The station is ready for everything, and the "Welcome Song" has already started playing on the speakers.Suddenly, the switchman raised a red light and issued an emergency call to the station. "What's going on? - The railway in front of me didn't know what to do, and suddenly several sections of the track were broken!" "What, you didn't find out who was doing the sabotage?" "No! Even if someone wants to destroy the railway tracks, they won't be able to remove the roadbed together, right? The strange thing is that the roadbeds of the broken rails are gone." Collapse!Crack!sink! Chinese cities are collapsing!sinking! From the picturesque Guilin in the south and Kunming, which is like spring all the year round, to the industrial cities of Shenyang and Harbin in the north, the husband who wakes up and finds that his beloved wife who sleeps in the same bed suddenly disappears, and the house that the father built for his son with all his painstaking efforts is instantly turned into nothingness. Unreal strange things are not uncommon, and they are increasing day by day.The notorious sinking of Shanghai has taken decades of arduous efforts, and Shanghai is still struggling with negativity.People from Suzhou, Wuxi, and Changzhou, the "Three Tigers" in southern Jiangsu who once rose during the reform and opening up, felt in a panic that their foothold was close to the "big brother" Shanghai.Taiyuan on the yellow land should not have such a fate, but it has the most miserable cry—"Once it sinks here, there will be no possibility of recovery forever!" The coal city is too short of golden water!The heart rhythm of Beijing, the heart of China, is also abnormal, because in the coastal city of Tianjin, which is only more than 100 kilometers away from it, the amplitude of the heart rate has reached 216 mm in the past 30 years!The combined area of ​​the three subsidence centers in the urban area is 730 square kilometers, and the Haihe River is close to pouring... Save the city!While the city is developing rapidly, it is also running towards the end!Nothing in the coming twenty-first century could be more pressing and more crucial than balancing this relationship. However, not all people living in cities know this.For a few cents of vegetable prices, for more buses to go to work, for a unit in a new building.They shouted and appealed all day long, but few people cared about the disaster around them and under their feet.Once they suffer from catastrophe, they can only complain about God.At that time, perhaps people will suddenly understand that the first and most important reason for the collapse, ground fissure and subsidence of the city is caused by man himself.In those cities where tragedies have occurred and may occur, the investigations of scientific workers have already concluded that the intensification of the ground load will lead to large-scale subsidence and ground failure on the ground with unstable geological structures such as slopes, fractures, and expansive soils. Cracks, and excessive use and development of groundwater is the root cause of urban sinking.There is also the heat emitted from the big chimneys like bamboo shoots, the torrent of car exhaust, etc., making you and me living in the city closer and closer to embracing death. Some people think that the take-off of the modern economy mainly depends on the city, and the construction of the city must develop the scale of the city on the original basis, and the development of the scale will inevitably lead to an excessive concentration of population: some people have to drink water, and almost 80% of the drinking water in the city The above are from the underground, and more than 90% of the industrial water used in factories and mines is also from the same source; it can be seen that "the fate arranged by God is difficult to change", this view seems too negative.In fact, it is not the case. The public hazards caused by human beings to the earth, including earthquakes, can be completely reduced or avoided. The problem is that people must have sufficient clear understanding and active defense measures.California spent $6 billion and avoided $38 billion in losses.Chinese cities should learn from California.