Swaraj instinctively asked in response.
Marlo glanced at Gu Ji with a thoughtful look, and only then confird that his previous feeling was not wrong.
"Camaraderie" is applicable in any country in the world. Upon hearing that Gu Ji had also served in the Army Mountain Division, Swaraj’s attitude noticeably changed, and he agreed to his application to join him.
About twenty minutes later, at Fatima’s phone request, the magistrate of Darjeeling District rushed over with a dozen transport vehicles and engineering teams to help the soldiers of the special border forces transport military TNT explosives.
"Vidi, be careful!"
"Don’t worry."
Facing Fatima’s concern, Gu Ji shrugged his shoulders, tightened the backpack, and then boarded the transport vehicle.
The 57 Mountain Division dispatched 18 people, excluding Swaraj and his deputy, leaving exactly 16 people, divided into A and B groups. It was through conversation that it was learned their tasks were not only to transport military explosives and command the detonation but also to provide ard protection. As for the process of loading explosives, it required the assistance of the state governnt’s engineering team.
Arriving in front of the dam.
The first thing that ca to the ears was the loud "whooshing," the noise generated when the dam sluice gates released water. Ali Bur Dam, a dium-sized dam, spans five to six hundred ters and is over seventy ters high, an impressive sight. The long dam structure intercepts the rushing northbound waters of the Mahananda River, with iron towers standing starkly above, and a vast network of power lines spreading out like a web.
Ali Bur Dam is the first major dam in the northern part of West Bengal.
Gu Ji chose to blow it up, or rather, the common reason for blowing up the three dams was their sheer size and significant location!
First, the Ali Bur Dam is sufficiently large, with a storage capacity of 3.62 billion cubic ters, and its location is even more crucial, situated at the point of greatest river drop. It’s precisely because of the enormous difference of about 50 ters between upstream and downstream that it houses a 565,000-kilowatt generator set capable of providing ample electricity to surrounding areas.
At that ti, when Gu Ji decided to blow it up, officials and experts from both the finance and water resources departnts strongly opposed it.
Yet the dangerous reality was evident: with only four sluice gates, the speed of drainage is severely limited. Once the upstream water volu surges, causing the dam to breach, there’s no need to think; it is bound to trigger successive breaches of downstream dium and small dams, resulting in an unprecedented super flood in a century.
Upon reaching the central control room of the dam,
Gu Ji and Marlo handed over docunts to the staff and took a glance at the monitoring data. As expected, the water storage level of the dam was already on the verge of the warning line, and the little bit of water discharged from the sluice gates couldn’t possibly lower the reservoir to a safe level before the tropical storm arrived.
After cross-referencing the site’s dam construction blueprints, confirming that the original drawings provided by the Presidential Palace were accurate, he instructed the dam manager to direct personnel evacuation, then began implenting the first demolition plan with the soldiers of the special border forces.
Every hydroelectric station in the world has two types of structures: gravity dams and arch dams.
A gravity dam is easy to understand, it’s a dam that withstands the rushing river waters by its weight, very solid; while an arch dam is a bit complex, it transfers the imnse pressure brought by the river to the walls on both sides through its structure, utilizing stress to resist enormous water pressure. The Gauhati Dam Gu Ji saw in Assam was similar.
Compared to gravity dams, arch dams save labor, materials, and ti, needing only about a third of the concrete. However, this type of dam has a drawback; if you damage a single point in it, the trendous water pressure will cause the dam to collapse, leading to a catastrophe.
This is the very flaw Gu Ji intended to exploit.
The 1943 "Operation Chastise" executed by the British Air Force, which bombed the Ruhr dams, similarly took advantage of this structural weakness, requiring only three 4.5-ton bombs to destroy a dam that would otherwise require at least 40 tons of explosives to demolish.
Fortunately, most of the dams in India are arch dams.
Otherwise, if it was like the concrete gravity dam of the Three Gorges in the Xia Kingdom, it wouldn’t even be worth considering; conventional weapons wouldn’t even leave a dent, as these ga-structures are designed to withstand gaton-level nuclear weapons.
Luckily, Gu Ji’s intent was not to completely destroy the dam; he simply needed to create a breach, thereby accelerating the reservoir drainage speed, avoiding large-scale flooding during a tropical storm, and allowing minimal repair costs afterward.
After reviewing his action plan, Marlo had the technical soldiers use the Indian SWITCH drone to fly around the dam, confirming the general working environnt of the dam structure, before assigning the engineering team to transport, hoist, and drill for the explosives.
"Your plan is well-designed, completing the task with just 187 kilograms of TNT, that’s quite easy!"
"Since it’s handled by your military personnel, the technical aspect must be far superior to that of an ordinary engineering team, which is why I’m using a more complex thod - the multi-row micro-delay blasting technique."
Faced with Marlo’s inquiry, Gu Ji casually responded.
Upon hearing the technical term "multi-row micro-delay blasting," Marlo realized that he genuinely understood blasting technology.
Micro-delay blasting is an advanced thod of simple shallow or deep hole blasting, primarily referring to the process where explosive charges in adjacent blast holes detonate sequentially and in extrely short intervals, typically calculated in milliseconds, according to a pre-designed order of initiation, a complex blasting thod.
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