It will twist 385 miles through the walls of the canyons, all the way from the dam site near Yichang upriver to the large city of Chongqing. The reservoir's 10.4 trillion gallons of water will force almost two million valley residents to abandon their ancestral homes and terraced farmlands. Inundation More that 320 villages and 140 towns will be submerged as well as fifty four thousand plus acres of farmland and seventeen thousand acres forests. This fertile farmland and forests are one of the foundations of China's heritage and contain many temples, shrines, and other archeological sites. It is feared that the increased weight of the reservoir might trigger another earthquake that could upset the dam and create an unimaginable disaster.
Landslides are also a possible effect of the dam.
Reservoir bank erosion could possibly cause large-scale landslides. These would come about because of the changing of the flow and water level of the river and the stability of the canyon slopes. Water Pollution Along the Yangtze River, around eighty percent of the cities do not have sewage systems, and it is far cheaper to dump into the river than to treat it at a sewage treatment plant. The industries along the river already dump extremely dangerous amounts of toxins and raw waste into the river as it is. With the completion of the dam, these pollutants will no longer be flushed downstream by the quickly moving waters, but be trapped inside the reservoir, creating an extinction zone for life.