Started in 1994 and completed in 2006, The Three Gorges Dam displaced an estimated 1.3 to 1.5 million people, leading to the closure of 114 towns and 1,680 villages and the submersion of two cities.

That’s pretty big. Compared to the TVA project of the 1930’s, it’s about 5 times the size of displaced people and homes. Then again, the world population is about 4 times what it was in 1930, so bigger, but not outrageously so, all things considered.

For relatability, the TVA watershed, much of it acquired by eminent domain, is a contiguous land area comprised by parts of Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. That does not mean TVA owns all 41,000 square miles, there’s lots of homes and industry within (I live there!), but TVA controls the rivers and waterways through a series of interrelated dams (49 of them), locks, and canals. (As well as a bunch of other stuff: coal & gas power plants, nuke facilities, etc.) They control power production across a vast area, are active in wildlife and conservation and lots of other stuff which grew out of the original mission: to tame the flooding and disease (mostly malaria) which came with the “natural” environment.

It was and is, you would have to say, a raging success. FDR wanted to replicate it in the Pacific Northwest, but TVA was suddenly embroiled in scandal of some underlings, and the politics made it not worth the effort to go so big. Luckily a few things were done, the Grand Coulee and Bonneville, which supplied power for aluminum plants and helped fuel the massive production of aircraft for World War II. In this neck of the woods, TVA provided huge power for Oak Ridge and the development of the U—235 atomic bomb.

Very propitious: it was completed and then desperately needed only a half dozen years later.