Did gung-ho policies cause an earthquake?

Did gung-ho policies cause an earthquake?
31 January 2009 by A. C. Grayling

Rescuers search for victims in the debris of collapsed buildings at the earthquake-affected Dujiangyan. 70,000 people were killed in the earthquake that hammered southwest China (Image: Sipa Press / Rex Features)
ON 12 May 2008 an earthquake of magnitude 7.9 hit the eastern region of Sichuan Province in China. It killed 70,000 people, made 5 million people homeless, blocked rivers, and put more than 300 dams at risk, threatening yet more death and damage from flooding.
The quake was felt as far away as India, Taiwan and Mongolia. It was caused by movement of the fault that lies between the high plateau of Tibet and the crust beneath the Sichuan basin and south-east China. Seismology tells us that earthquakes occur when the tectonic stresses that accumulate along faults reach a critical point and a sudden release occurs. There can always be speculation about what triggers an individual earthquake, however. Natural inevitability is one thing, but what if the trigger is pulled by mankind?
That question is now being asked about the Sichuan earthquake. A suggestion recently made by seismologists is that Sichuan's newest dam, completed in 2006, might be to blame. This is the Zipingku dam on the Min river near Dujiangyan. The increasing load of water in the reservoir behind the dam might have been the final straw that provoked the catastrophic release of the Longmenshan fault's local stresses. If so, the seismologists who warned of an earthquake risk before the dam was built have been vindicated.
Sichuan is a land of many dams, most of them built in recent decades. The mightiest of them is the Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze river. It is the world's biggest dam, lying a mere 550 kilometres east of the Sichuan earthquake's epicentre. That fact had engineers rushing to check the safety of the Three Gorges dam in the quake's aftermath. The reverse procedure - checking the earthquake and other environmental implications for the region before this or any other large dams, such as Zipingku, were built - did not have nearly the same urgency for a country involved in a headlong and ruthless rush for economic development.
As it happens, one of the most tragic aspects of the Sichuan quake was the many deaths of schoolchildren, whose cheaply and hastily built schools collapsed on them. The poor construction of schools and the gung-ho production of dozens of dams in a tectonically active region are of a piece: they are both evidence of carelessness, skewed values and folly.