Damned if we do: are we calculating the true costs of potentially earth-shattering development projects?

IN WHAT MAY TURN OUT TO BE THE MOTHER OF ALL cautionary tales for development economics, geologists around the world are beginning to suspect that a large dam project in southern China may have been the triggering event for the devastating 2008 earthquake which rocked Sichuan province. The quake, which measured magnitude 8.0 on the Richter scale, claimed more than 80,000 lives, including thousands of children trapped in their collapsing (and often poorly constructed) school buildings.

The Wenchuan quake devastated communities throughout the region and essentially destroyed several large cities. It will take the region years, if not decades, to recover, though many parents--forced to follow Chinas one-child, one-family policy--who lost their only child certainly never will. The disaster cost China $123 billion in direct economic losses. The question that one can only hope will keep bureaucrats across the globe awake at night: Could such a disaster have been avoided?

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According to The New York Times, "A Columbia University scientist who studied the quake believes it may have been triggered by the weight of 320 million tons of water in the Zipingpu reservoir less than a mile from a well-known major fault. His conclusions, presented to the American Geophysical Union in December, coincide with a new finding by Chinese geophysicists that the dam caused significant seismic changes before the earthquake."

Chinese planners apparently ignored warnings about the dam's potential influence on seismic stability. The Zipingpu dam was completed in 2006. If true, the revelation only adds to the list of failures bedeviling Beijing's legitimacy among a vast populace growing more restive by the week. The dam, upstream of a city of more than 600,000 people, was damaged in the quake and by some analyses was near catastrophic collapse.

Seismologists have been collecting examples of "triggered seismicity" for four decades. "The surprising thing to me is that you need very little mechanical disturbance to trigger an earthquake," seismologist Leonardo Seeber of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York told Science magazine recently. Science reports: "Removing fluid or rock from the crust, as in oil production or coal mining, could do it. So might injecting fluid to store wastes or sequester carbon dioxide, or adding the weight of 100 meters or so of water behind a dam."

Bemused economists have long tracked the head-shaking anti-results of some large-scale development projects--dams, highways, airports, and the like--that not only fail to produce many of the social and economic goods "guaranteed" by such development, but consume vast reservoirs of public resources while they don't do it. They may now have to add seismic disaster to their real-world evaluation of big development projects run amok.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY? PERHAPS THOSE FREQUENTLY derided environmental impact studies, whether conducted in China or closer to home, should be taken a little more seriously before the beginning of major development projects--particularly those with catastrophic potential, however unlikely they may appear when eager planners are poring over the blueprints.

Yes, I am talking to you, neo-nuclear power proponents. Let's not forget that all the presumed benefits of nuclear power would evaporate in a nanosecond after a single major nuke incident. Just ask the people who used to live near a place called Chernobyl or anyone old enough to remember wondering how far New York was from Three Mile Island.

We can tinker irresponsibly with the stuff of creation, and we can build monuments to our might and imagination like the Zipingpu dam. But the next time a scene of such devastation as the Wenchuan quake lights up your HDTV, feel free to wonder if the reporters have it right when they blame it on an "act of God"

It might just be poor planning.

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Check out Kevin Clarke's blog at uscatholic.org

By KEVIN CLARKE, senior editor at U.S. CATHOLIC and online content manager at Claretian Publications.