‘The Most Dangerous Dam in the World’
It’s a genuine challenge to come up with adjectives, which haven’t been used thousands of times before, to describe the multitude of fiascos in Iraq. They each appear more painful than the last. Consider, for example, the story of the Mosul Dam.
The largest dam in Iraq is in serious danger of an imminent collapse that could unleash a trillion-gallon wave of water, possibly killing thousands of people and flooding two of the largest cities in the country, according to new assessments by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other U.S. officials.
Even in a country gripped by daily bloodshed, the possibility of a catastrophic failure of the Mosul Dam has alarmed American officials, who have concluded that it could lead to as many as 500,000 civilian deaths by drowning Mosul under 65 feet of water and parts of Baghdad under 15 feet, said Abdulkhalik Thanoon Ayoub, the dam manager. “The Mosul dam is judged to have an unacceptable annual failure probability,” in the dry wording of an Army Corps of Engineers draft report.
U.S. officials are aware of the disaster-waiting-to-happen, and initiated a $27 million reconstruction project to help shore up the dam. So what happened? “Incompetence and mismanagement” have marred the project.
The Army Corps of Engineers’ draft report describes this as “the most dangerous dam in the world,” adding, “If a small problem [at] Mosul Dam occurs, failure is likely.”
But wait, there’s more. Iraqi and U.S. officials realize how serious the situation is, but have decided not to tell Iraqis, for fear of scaring them.
The debate has taken place largely out of public view because both Iraqi and U.S. Embassy officials have refused to discuss the details of safety studies — commissioned by the U.S. government for at least $6 million — so as not to frighten Iraqi citizens.
I’m not an expert on such matters, but if a trillion-gallon wave of water may burst through an unsafe dam and put much of Mosul under 20 meters of water, shouldn’t the Iraqi citizens be frightened? Maybe if these citizens knew, the problem may be more likely to get fixed in a hurry?
Also, Ilan Goldenberg raised a good point: “I hope this dam has some serious security around it. If it doesn’t, it should.” Quite right. If even a “small problem” could cause dam failure, officials need to keep a close eye on intentional problems.
For what it’s worth, the dam has been a problem for decades, due in large part to the fact that it was built on top of something called a “gypsum,” which, as the WaPo explained, “dissolves when it comes into contact with water.” Not exactly what one looks for in a dam.
Almost immediately after the dam was completed in the early 1980s, engineers began injecting the dam with grout, a liquefied mixture of cement and other additives. More than 50,000 tons of material have been pumped into the dam since then in a continual effort to prevent the structure, which can hold up to 3 trillion gallons of water, from collapsing.
As Swopa concluded, “Wait a second… a massive undertaking built on an inherently contradictory and unstable foundation… requiring exhaustive efforts just to keep from falling apart completely… this reminds me of something! Just wish I could put my finger on what…”
Send in FEMA and Blackwater –they have experience with floods.
For what it’s worth, the dam has been a problem for decades, due in large part to the fact that it was built on top of something called a “gypsum,” which, as the WaPo explained, “dissolves when it comes into contact with water.” Not exactly what one looks for in a dam.
It’s not “A” Gypsum. Gypsum is what makes up drywall.
Just a suggestion – LOWER THE WATER LEVEL IN THE DAM, DUMMIES.
“Incompetence and mismanagement”
From the Bush administration…………………Nah.
If the US government won’t tell the Iraqis, world charities should immediately donate an inflatable raft to every Iraqi family! If half a million people are at risk, it’s the least somebody could do.
If Mosul and Baghdad are at risk, so is Samarra, which lies between them with its population of more than 200,000.
Repeat after me: “No one could have possibly foreseen that the dam would fail.”
So, in the US, where your chances of being blown up, dragged from your home and tortured or shot by invaders are about -200% we receive constant reminders to BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID.
In Iraq, where the odds of being blown up etc are very, very high, people living near a fragile dam must be shielded from the facts lest they be “frightened.”
That makes a fuck of a lot of sense, until you realize the real reason is long lines of evacuees with no place to go can’t be spun into a picture of success lurking just around the corner.
The only hope I take from this is that the report came out before the damn (sorry) thing burst. Who here thinks the bAdmin wanted this information to come out at all?
I see no hands.
And who here thinks that if there had been a breach before the report came out the bAdmin would have found out what happened before screaming about terrists, suppressing any reports that suggested it wasn’t terrists before finally (and grudginly) admitting that it might have been an inevitable structural failure?
[crickets chirp]
If it blows then BushCo will blame the terrists. Count on it. And the Iraqis will blame us. Count on that too.
Think we’re popular there now? Just wait til there’s a million more refugees and hundreds of thousands of dead people flowing down the Tigris.
It’ll make New Orleans look like a picnic.
Send in FEMA and Blackwater –they have experience with floods. -JKap
I’m sure Blackwater is salivating at the chance to guard something where failure could result in the death of half a million innocent Iraqis. It’s a psychopath’s wet dream.
“If it blows then BushCo will blame the terrists. Count on it. And the Iraqis will blame us. Count on that too.”
-Racerx
And the wingnuts will blame the victims for not leaving beforehand.
It’s easy to see how massive the reservoir is in satellite images.
We’re going to drown them over there so that we don’t have to drown them here.
And even more wingnuts will blame the media for revealing the flaws to the terristseses.
Dear lord … I hope for the sake of the Iraqi people someone, somewhere, fixes that thing. After seeing what can happen when a smallish reservoir breaks, I can’t even begin to fathom what would happen if that gigantic thing snapped.
It’s a shock that the Bush admin would actually hide something. On one hand, I suspect that the originaly engineers were overruled by the politicos (ie: the so-called Awesome aka Saddam) when they initially built the thing. Now a different nations’s engineers are being muzzled by the politicos yet again. The stupidity of human politicians is a universal constant.
And the Talevan will say the victims should have rejected Mohammed and accepted Jesus. And I will pick up a baseball bat…
The links provided by F. Fredson and Mark D are making my hair stand on end. If they don’t evacuate the people in the path it will be manslaughter on a massive scale.
My guess is both lowering the water level at the dam and evacuating Mosul are probably impractical; lowered water levels could result in water shortages (no joke in the hot climate) and evacuating the populace (difficult even without a civil war going on) brings up the question of where to evacuate them to. Remember this isn’t a short term evacuation – they’d need to be gone for the years it would take to rebuild the dam.
And of course they are probably right that disseminating the knowledge that the dam is in peril gives terrorists a great opening. The bad news is they all probably knew already.
Just out of curiosity—how many US troops are on the edge of being flushed down the river by this? Mosul…Samarra…Baghdad…it’s got to be a lot. Even if it costs just 2% of US force-strength, we’re talking about an approximate doubling of the total fatality count.
Immediately. Not over four-and-a-half years—but within about a fraction of an hour or so.
Lowering the water level isn’t enough; the blasted thing has to be drained, dug out, and re-based on bedrock—not a great big bed of gypsum. A project that big’ll take maybe a couple of decades—and that’s if the resources were available for the project.
Which, of course, they aren’t….
Let me guess, they built the near billion dollar embassy in the lowest part of Baghdad.
TAIO, some of those victims will be soldiers and somehow, someway, they will figure out how to blame them for not leaving, even the ones that wanted to and especially the ones that never wanted to be there to begin with.
Only this administration could possibly flood the Middle East.
ScottW
I was curious about that, too, and Google Earth shows four confusing locations for “US embassy”. One is called the “US embassy” in northern Bagdad alongside the Green Zone, on the river. The second is south of it in the center of Baghdad, and it’s also called the “US embassy”, on the rivcr. Then a couple of miles away is another site called the “US embassy complex”, on the river. Finally about three miles southwest of that site is the “permanent US embassy site”, on the river. If you want to see the sites, do Google Earth and Baghdad US embassy.
Every location important to the US is right on the river that would flood, though I don’t see the elevations. It looks like the river is bulkheaded.
I wondered what the dam breaking would do to oil production.