By Liang Chao (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-05-21 11:20

The 307-km Shijiazhuang-Beijing section of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project is ready to pump water from Hebei province to Beijing with the completion of all its facilities, an expert panel sent for an official appraisal of its construction announced on Tuesday.

After checking all the facilities including large inverted siphon, aqueduct bridge, buried culvert and open ditch, the experts led by an office in charge of the water diversion's construction under the State Council came to the conclusion that "all the 13 item projects have been up to the designed standards."

With over 5 years of construction around the clock, the section linking four reservoirs in the neighboring Hebei Province with Beijing to help ease possible shortages in China's capital city is now ready to supply water for Beijing at any moment if needed, they said.

The 17-billion-yuan ($2.4 billion) Beijing-Shijiazhuang section is designed to carry up to 400 million cubic meters of water per year from the four reservoirs in Hebei to Beijing.

The entire diversion project, which consists of three south-to-north canals, each running more than 1,000 km across the eastern, middle and western parts of the country, was designed to divert water from the water-rich south to the dry north in China.

It is scheduled for completion in 2050 with an estimated investment of about 500 billion yuan ($72 billion).