"The dam is deformed in places, but safe."

An engineer I'm not, but when I hear 'deformed' in connection to 'dam', I get real nervous.

But why shouldn't we believe him?  After all, he's a good Party guy, and the fact that he'd wind up dead as a lot of Uighurs if he said there was a real problem wouldn't affect his assessment, would it?

This is a freaking HUGE damn, and if it even partially went- say most of it somehow didn't collapse- it'd still be a disaster of biblical proportions, and a large part of the Chinese economy and food production would be trashed.