3.2 Threatening safety
The constructive and productive engineering requires the excavation and
backfill of earth and stone, which generates abandoned earth and slag,
disturbs the surface vegetation, triggers water and soil loss, and
brings a certain impact on the local ecological environment. Because
soil and water conservation projects are ancillary projects, its
construction quality being good or bad will not have a subversive effect
on the product profit. Therefore, some design units and construction
units have the same idea that the principal part of the project can
spend as much as possible, and the water and soil conservation project
should spend as little as possible. The low investment cost of soil and
water conservation led to the low standards and quality of engineering,
in turn, threatening the safety of the principal parts of the projects.
As shown in
Figure
3c, photovoltaic panels are vulnerable to damage when the wind blows
away the soil around their supports. On the other hand, during the
construction process, due to a lack of awareness of soil protection,
large-scale site leveling in the construction area destroyed the
vegetation, providing a favorable environment for soil erosion. After
the completion of construction, no timely soil and water conservation
measures – vegetation restoration – resulted in serious soil erosion
and threatened the safety of the principal part of the project. For
productive and constructive engineering, the production road is
extremely important, which is built to ensure that vehicles, personnel,
and materials can be timely transported to the construction site. As
shown in Figure 4a, although the production road was paved with sand and
drainage ditches were designed on both sides of the road, it was
destroyed by water erosion during the construction of wind power
projects due to low-quality protection. No protection measures had been
implemented for the slope after which was cut very steeply, resulting in
serious water erosion and destroying the drainage ditches beneath the
slope (Figure 4b). Besides, due to neglect of soil and water
conservation and lack of awareness of soil protection, the foundation
soil was seriously eroded and lost, thus undermining the stability of
the foundation and threatening the safety of the transmission tower
(Figure 4c), the wind-driven generator and transformer room (Figure 4d).
Especially
as soil erosion progresses, it will cause the electrical
tower
to collapse and wire to break or even to fire. Besides, neglect of soil
and water conservation in the construction areas may also cause
casualties and tremendous damage. Especially the excavation and backfill
in the process of
productive
and constructive projects may cause emergent and dangerous events, such
as collapse, landslide, and debris flow. For example, a catastrophic
landslide occurred at Hongao dumpsite on Dec 20, 2015, in Shenzhen,
Guangdong, Southeast China. The landslide caused 69 causalities with 8
missings, damaged 33 buildings and caused near 800 million RMB economic
loss (Xu et al., 2016), related soil and water conservation engineers
were arrested. For the safe operation of the principal part of the
project, the implementation of soil and water conservation projects is
essential for constructive and productive engineering.