Grand Korean Waterway

The Grand Korean Waterway, officially known as the Pan Korea Grand Waterway (한반도 대운하), is a proposed 540-kilometer (336 mile) long canal connecting Seoul and Busan, two of South Korea's largest cities. The canal would run diagonally across the country connecting the Han River, which flows though Seoul into the Yellow Sea, to the Nakdong River, which flows through Busan into the Korea Strait. The proposed canal would be 540 kilometers in length and traverse difficult mountainous terrain.

The canal is a project of Lee Myung-bak, the current president of South Korea. It has met with huge controversy and disapproval. Lee has stated that his canal would lessen the load on the clogged motorways of the country as heavy goods are taken off of trucks and put onto barges and rivercraft. He has also argued that it will revitalize the interior of the country with renewed tourism and investment.

Majority of Korean people are anxious about Lee's plans. They argue that the canal would prove disastrous to the natural environment and potentially hazardous to the freshwater sources that the 50 million residents of the country depend on. In addition, many researchers and the distribution industry interested prospect the canal even economically unprofitable because land transportation could be far more efficient than barges.

Supporters of this plan insist that the length of the construction would only be 40 km linking the Han River with the Nakdong River. But this opinion doesn't make sense. Canal requires sufficient width, depth and height of decks of bridges to make barge pass. But major portion of the existing rivers is far narrower and shallower, and most of the bridges are unsuitable to pass with barges. Hence there should be enormous scale of construction, rebuilding numbers of bridges and dredging the river bottoms throughout the whole 540 kilometers.

Lee proposes to fund the project almost exclusively through private funds and substantially from the sale of sand and gravel dredged from the rivers and streams involved in the project. This dredging will, he argues, make the rivers cleaner.

There would also be a smaller canal linking Seoul to neighboring Incheon. It is believed that this would assist economic partnerships between the two cities, lessen traffic congestion, stimulate tourism, and provide Seoul access to the Yellow Sea (West Sea). The mouth of the Han River is in an area between North Korea and South Korea, which limits economic activity in the region for security reasons.

See also

• Geography of South Korea
• Rivers of Korea

References

• "South Korean plans for a grand canal: Savior or folly?", International Herald Tribune, February 20, 2008, (Retrieved February 21, 2008)
• "Canal plan divides Korea",John Sudworth BBC News, Seoul (Retrieved 26th March 2008)
• "President-elect's team speeds up preparations for waterway project ", Korean Overseas Culture and Information Service