The Collapse of the Banqiao Reservoir and the Atomic Bomb

Every year, thousands of middle and high school students across the US and the world participate in National History Day ®, which culminates in the finals right next door to AIP at the University of Maryland, College Park. Of the approximately 500,0000 students who participate at the local levels, just 3,000 are awarded a place in the finals, competing as either individual or group projects. As part of the contest, AIP sponsors a special prize each year, which is awarded to one senior and one junior project:the History of the Physical Sciences & Technology Prize. The passion of these students for history is just amazing, and we were honored to be able to interview our prize winners this year. Please enjoy these reflections on the contest from the senior and junior prize-winning groups.

The Collapse of the Banqiao Reservoir

The senior prize went to Marcello Ortiz, Cathy Cheng, Maimai Li, Jason Cheng, and Ricky Ding, hailing from China, for their group exhibit titled, “Great Dam Tragedy: The Collapse of Banqiao Reservoir.” Below, the group tells us more about their project, including how they decided on a topic, how they managed the work, and what parts were challenging or surprising. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Marcello Ortiz: I am a history enthusiast, and National History Day was recommended by my history teacher, as a great way to practice my skills as a historian. My parents were very supportive too. With a few friends, we began researching lesser-known incidents in modern Chinese history that would fit the theme “Rights and Responsibilities in History.”

Luckily, we stumbled onto this dam collapse disaster in 1975 resulting from a record-breaking typhoon that impacted millions of people.

From the senior group: We chose [to pursue] the collapse of the Banqiao Reservoir for our project because we wanted to embody the theme – balance of both rights and responsibilities of the Chinese citizens and the government. Despite its devasting impacts, it was not widely covered by the media due to political turmoil during the Cultural Revolution. The lack of published evidence and on-scene photos make this a very challenging, yet intriguing project. We wanted to uncover the truth from different perspectives, including local farmers, hydrologists, political leaders, journalists, and bureaucrats. Furthermore, as China is famous for the Three Gorges Dam, we wanted to dig deeper into China’s past history of mega projects, which has made a huge impact on Chinese society and will continue to affect the environment.

We chose to create an exhibit since we thought it would be a great way to showcase the documentary photos and quotes from primary sources. We had a lot of fun designing the board, making modifications to the color scheme and layout. One of the many skills we learned is to be concise with our argument, making sure everything is well-supported without giving too many unnecessary details. Additionally, this assignment also expanded our knowledge and improved our research skills in Chinese and English. Due to the lack of information, as this was previously a classified subject, it was harder to scour for evidence, but [we] found some documentary photos and personal accounts published by the survivors and local leaders. We hoped to emphasize not only statistics of the typhoon and reservoir collapse, but also to unveil the historical context that led to this tragedy and how we should improve engineering by reflecting on past case studies.

Our two younger teammates were tasked with researching numerous resources in Chinese and English, while the older teammates strategized the argument by compiling all our evidence. One of our teammates was in charge of visiting the local region and interviewing survivors and local aid workers, securing firsthand accounts of the post-disaster. The boys worked together on the video editing, while girls designed the layout. It was fun putting the exhibit together twice, once in China and again in DC.

One aspect that surprised us was the tremendous amount of money and resources the Chinese government contributed towards the disaster relief and the long-term rebuilding of Henan province. The Red Army was deployed to mitigate the damage that the flood caused and airdropped supplies to help the civilians survive famine and illness. We also found the discrepancy in the death toll an interesting point to research as it reflected the lack of transparency and record of information.

Participating in NHD pushed us all to improve our presentation and researching skills, which are both important for our future as scholars and life after graduation. Connecting engineering concepts to economic and political influences helped us to learn to analyze and to think critically from multiple perspectives.

Marcello Ortiz: As an aspiring civil engineer, I learned that man-made infrastructure has a huge impact on social development and that building projects need to take into consideration many social, economic, and environmental factors.
History is my favorite subject as it is both interesting and relevant to the development of society. I am really keen on learning what mistakes humans are making now that may be a repeat of another mistake ages ago. History truly repeats itself and we progress by learning our history.

The Atomic Bomb: Rights and Responsibilities

Caleb Dixon, Hashaam Sheikh, and Javi Guerr from Texas won the junior prize for their group documentary, “The Destroyer of Worlds: How the Atomic Bomb Questioned Scientists’ Rights and Responsibilities.” The documentary is available to view online . This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Caleb, Hashaam, and Javi: Our school had been running a National History Day program for a couple of years, which we were introduced to in sixth grade. In seventh grade, Caleb participated in National History Day with a separate group. During the summer before eighth grade, we as a group decided to do NHD because of our shared interests in history, video editing, and because of our mutual friends who had participated in NHD before. We originally came up with the topic over the summer because it fit the responsibilities aspect of the theme that year. However, we put it off to research other topics. We eventually settled on this topic because we found the moral dilemma of using atomic weapons in warfare intriguing, and because of how thoroughly documented the project was.

We chose documentary because all three of us had prior experience in creating and editing videos through passion projects. Throughout the course of working on our documentary, we learned how to efficiently utilize the features and effects of the video editing program we were using, DaVinci Resolve, and the audio editing program Audacity. Throughout the time we spent working on our project we learned useful editing, time management, and bibliography skills. Javi especially, who spent a lot of time editing, learned a lot about DaVvinci Resolve as we progressed. As a group, we learned how to correctly format, annotate, and cite the sources in our bibliography. During our research, we also learned how to tell a compelling and interesting story while staying under the ten-minute limit.

While we made an effort to have every member of our group work on all aspects of our project, such as research, there were several fields that we individually focused on more. Caleb mainly worked on writing our script and recording all lines for the documentary. Javi focused on the bibliography, revising and editing key sections of the documentary, and overall quality control. Hashaam made most of his efforts on the process paper, compiling clips and importing them on Resolve, and revising the script. We decided these roles based on our strengths and personal preferences, and our clear communication definitely shined through in these moments.

What we found most surprising was the amount of varying perspectives scientists had on the Manhattan Project, and how their voices went largely unheard during the atomic bomb’s construction. For example, the petition that warned against the use of the weapon in Japan was signed by over 100 personnel, yet never made it to Truman.

We would like to mention that a prominent member we attempted to contact, Peter Lax, passed away shortly before the nationals competition. He was a mathematician on the Manhattan Project and was one of the last surviving members.

A little more about the group:
Caleb and Javi both enjoy playing French horn for Lake Belton, and Hashaam enjoys Computer Science.

Recommendations from the junior group: There’s a very interesting book written by Cynthia Kelly titled The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians . It contained a lot of project-altering information that shaped how we viewed the Manhattan Project as a whole. We also recommend checking out @CalebDixonNHD on YouTube for an extended version of our project, as well as future NHD projects we’ll work on.