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

The Guardian ^ | 03/02/2016 | Julian Borger

[Jan_Sobieski]

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 Euro 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.

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. One of the Iraqi engineers, now living in Europe, described as "ridiculous" the Iraqi government’s emergency policy of telling local people to move 6km (3.5 miles) from the river banks...

[Little Ray]

Pick a wrecked sluice gate. Build a casemate behind it. Blow it open the sluice gate, them make an appropriate size opening in the casemate. Keep the water going through until somebody can repair the remaining gates.

[Moltke]

Iraqi engineers

"Take my wife...please" Badda-bing!

[Future Snake Eater]

IIRC, Saddam Hussein chose the build site for the dam based on the exhaustive engineering criteria of “it will look nice in that spot.” It turns out to be built on gypsum (I think). While we were there, the Army Corps of Engineers was pumping cement into the ground to firm it up. I guess it wasn’t enough.

[minnesota_bound]

#39 Mulholland would agree with you. Mulholland said the day it collapsed that all dams leak.

St. Francis Dam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis_Dam
Many photos.
http://tinyurl.com/zqdl8vo