News Article: Mosul dam engineers warn it could fail at any time, killing 1m people

Bamaro

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Oct 19, 2001
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From an article written last March
Iraqi engineers involved in building the Mosul dam 30 years ago have warned that the risk of its imminent collapse and the consequent death toll could be even worse than reported.

They pointed out that pressure on the dam’s compromised structure was building up rapidly as winter snows melted and more water flowed into the reservoir, bringing it up to its maximum capacity, while the sluice gates normally used to relieve that pressure were jammed shut.

The Iraqi engineers also said the failure to replace machinery or assemble a full workforce more than a year after Islamic State temporarily held the dam means that the chasms in the porous rock under the dam were getting bigger and more dangerous every day.

On Wednesday, the Iraqi government announced it had signed a €273m (£210m) contract with an Italian contractor to reinforce and maintain the Mosul dam for 18 months, following talks in New York between the Italian foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, and US and Iraqi officials. Italy has said it plans to send 450 troops to protect the dam site, but it is unclear how long it will take to replace damaged machinery and reassemble the required workforce.
Iraqi PM and US issue warnings over threat of Mosul dam collapse

The engineers warned that potential loss of life from a sudden catastrophic collapse of the Mosul dam could be even greater than the 500,000 officially estimated, as they said many people could die in the resulting mass panic, with a 20-metre-high flood wave hitting the city of Mosul and then rolling on down the Tigris valley through Tikrit and Samarra to Baghdad.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...n-it-could-fail-at-any-time-killing-1m-people
:eek2:
 

Tidewater

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This is why we can't have nice things.
Of course if you say that to an Arab, you're a racist.
On the other hand, the idea of preventive maintenance is very unarabic. It won't break if God doesn't will it to break, and if God does will it to break, who are you to question God's judgment, blasphemer?
This is why we can't have nice things.
 

Elefantman

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More info here:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/a-bigger-problem-than-isis

It’s one of the ironies of Iraq’s political situation that the dam’s turbines still provide electricity to Mosul, which is now under isis control; intelligence reports indicate that isis has earned millions of dollars by taxing the electricity. After the peshmerga captured the dam two years ago, Kurdish officials intended to shut down the turbines, but American officials told them that this would add more water to the reservoir, making the dam more likely to burst. So isis continued to profit from the dam. “We wanted to strangle them, but we weren’t allowed,” a Kurdish official told me.
 

Bamaro

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Oct 19, 2001
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Wow. No spillway? You you just provide money to your enemies?
From Wiki
The Mosul Dam is a 113 m (371 ft) tall and 3.4 km (2.1 mi) long earth-fill embankment-type with a clay-core. The width of the crest is 10 m (33 ft). At an elevation of 330 m (1,080 ft) above sea level, the reservoir, named Lake Dahuk, withholds 11,100,000,000 m3 (9,000,000 acre·ft) of water. Of that capacity 8,100,000,000 m3 (6,600,000 acre·ft) is active (or useful for power and downstream releases) and 2,950,000,000 m3 (2,390,000 acre·ft) is inactive (dead) storage. On the east side of the dam is the service spillway which is controlled by five radial gates and has a maximum discharge capacity of 13,000 m3/s (460,000 cu ft/s). Further to the east is a fuse-plug-controlled emergency spillway with a 4,000 m3/s (140,000 cu ft/s) capacity.[2]

At the toe of the dam on its west side is the main hydroelectric power station (Mosul 1). It contains four 187.5 MW (251,400 hp) Francis turbine-generators for an installed capacity of 750 MW. Behind the power station are four surge tanks. Downstream of the dam is the Mosul regulation dam, which serves to regulate the tail-waters of the main dam but to generate electricity as well. The hydroelectric plant (Mosul 2) has an installed capacity of 62 MW with four 15.5 MW Kaplan turbine-generators. Immediately upstream of the dam is the 240 MW pumped-storage power station (Mosul 3). It serves as a peaking power station by pumping water to small reservoir about Lake Dahuk, storing it, then releasing the water back down to two 120 reversible-Francis turbines during peak energy usable. The entire Mosul multi-purpose project has an installed capacity of 1,052 MW.[2]
 

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