The Engineer

“Over the past 30 years we have developed a lot in this region” Mei Han tells me. “Just one flood can wipe away everything we have gained, and it’s my job to stop this happening.”

The City of Zhaoqing in China’s Guangdong province lies on a plain between the West River and the mountains. It is also the key point in flood defence for the whole Pearl Delta area. If the river floods here the water can take out Guangzhou and all the surrounding cities. Most people in Zhaoqing have no memory of the great flood of 1915, when the river burst its banks and more than 100,000 people died in the havoc that followed over the next seven days, but for water engineer Mei Han it serves as a constant reminder of the consequences of getting her calculations wrong.

Born in Anhui province in central China, Mei Han moved south to Zhaoqing 20 years ago as a young engineer working for the local water authority. She slowly worked her way up and now heads up a team of engineers in charge of flood defences along the West River. She is in charge of the 1.1 billion RMB project to build and maintain the Lian Wei defences that runs along the river banks that are designed simply to keep the water inside the river. She is in a constant battle with an increasingly unpredictable climate. While some regions of China are facing unprecedented drought, others are facing unusual amounts of rain. But it’s not the rain that falls in Zhaoqing that she worries about but the increasing rainfall in Yunnan and Guangxi from where the river runs.

“We have studied the river for many years”, Mei Han says, “but nowadays everything is changing. We are unclear about what climate change is doing, we just know we have to keep building the dam higher and higher to protect the area from flood.”

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About D J Clark

D J Clark has worked worldwide as a photojournalist for more than 20 years.

He specialises in working with international development NGOs to highlight social, political and environmental issues through long term photography projects.

D J Clark researches and writes about photography as a vehicle for social change, the subject that drives both his photographic and academic work. More recently his work has concentrated on Multi Media news production.