In many places it s a mile wide, but going through the Three Gorges, it narrows considerably. Sometimes it spreads out and goes through lakes and other holding ponds. The area is a very hot area in China, so the people that are now displaced and you re talking about one percent of the Chinese population displaced at this point and many living on dikes are in tremendous heat and humidity, and so one of the attributes of this area is not just the water, but the tough physical environment that people are having to put up with you can expect, I think, despite the best efforts of China s health authorities, water born disease, sewage disposal problems, and everything that goes with that, so this is an extraordinary problem the Chinese are facing. This is a mammoth thing that we re talking about. I would have to say too foreign press have not been allowed into the area, and I think it ll be probably months before the outside world fully understands and probably the Chinese authorities, themselves, fully understands what s happening in some of the more remote areas.
China always has floods.
The intensity varies, and there are always floods in this river basin. The thing we have to realize is there are 400 million people living in the river basin. In this country we d have to take the entire U.S. population, squeeze it East of the Mississippi River and multiply it by five to get a feel for the density of population in the inhabited region of China, which is mostly Eastern and Southern China. For example, just making room for people means a lot of deforestation. 85 percent of the original forests covering the river basin is no longer there.