The Sanmexia Reservoir in China, an extreme case, was completed in 1960 and already decommissioned by 1964; it had silted up completely. The Tehri Dam in India, the sixth-highest in the world, recently saw its projected useful life reduced from one hundred to thirty years due to horrific deforestation in the Himalaya foothills. In the Dominican Republic, the eighty-thousand-kilowatt Tavera Hydroelectric Project, the country’s largest, was completed in 1973; by 1984, silt behind the dam had reached a depth of eighteen meters and storage capacity had been reduced by 40 percent.
