What people often fail to realize (I heard this said after Oroville) is that a disaster averted and/or delayed is not the same thing as a disaster that did not almost take place.
Sometimes, like in Oroville a combination of good luck and quick action averts disaster, sometimes as with the Dam in China, just plain dumb luck and maybe slightly better building construction than even the designer thought (when he "died suddenly" a few months ago).
Or, it may be, as many engineers have suggested, they have gotten through "round one," but the race to repair things may or may not work, and may or may not be enough.
So the dam may last 700 more years or we may be reading in 7 weeks, months, or years that it has collapsed and taken half of China's industrial base with it.
It bothers me not at all when a predicted disaster does not occur for various reasons (possibly including prayer or intention experiments, I saw millions of people listening to Art Bell pray and "move" the hurricane that was supposed to have hit where Katrina did only by morning it hit a few sugarcane fields, Katrina would happen later).
It bothers me a lot when people start laughing, joking, or making fun of those who were worried about the projected disaster and/or reporting on it as if they were fools to be worried.
There were hundreds of people (including Engineers) who had concerns (from engineers using modeling to psychics and visionariess) who were concerned about The Challenger and they launched it anyway.
If the weather had warmer just a couple of degrees, they would all have looked like fools but seven people would still be alive; however another crew, the next Winter might have died instead because (like the Three Gorges Dam) the design was flawed or at least not able to handle certain types of conditions.
Sheer luck might have made it through the entire shuttle program with no one knowing if it had never been launched below 32 degrees F, but it was.
The Three Gorges Dam may have survived this time, but if the problems can't be fixed, it may not be as lucky the next time there are mega-floods, which happen naturally ever few hundred years (we know that from watermarks) and that is without the changes caused by the creation of dams and other industry themselves.
