People in cities along China’s Yangtze River, which have already been inundated with water, are now scrambling to shore up embankments and dykes before the Three Gorges Dam releases more water and towns are swamped again by the third big flood this summer.

The Yangtze has again become a raging torrent. On Monday evening, stormwater started to pour into the reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam in the Yangtze’s middle reaches at more than 60,000 cubic meters per second.

The amount of water is the same as the peak flow rate 10 days ago, which added more than 10 billion cubic meters of water to the mega-dam’s artificial lake.  

After the National Meteorological Center in Beijing flagged fresh deluge warnings last weekend, the China Three Gorges Group, the dam’s operator, again put itself on a “wartime” footing.

The company lifted the dam’s floodgates and spillways on Saturday and Sunday to discharge water to partially empty the 39.3 billion-cubic-meter reservoir so it could be used to block the expected flood starting from Monday, with tributaries and lakes offstream still overflowing.