
A bigger problem than ISIS: The Mosul Dam is failing - anigbrowl
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/a-bigger-problem-than-isis
======
21
Stunning picture showing a portion of the huge amount of water behind, at 300
ft higher:
[http://www.globalconstructionreview.com/client_media/images/...](http://www.globalconstructionreview.com/client_media/images/x846.aerial_view_of_mosul_dam.jpg.pagespeed.ic.od7I9iy-
mQ.jpg)

~~~
jxramos
Wow, amazing to see that much water and no greenery surrounding it.

------
impostervt
Dexter Filkins, the writer of this piece, is also the author of one of the
best non-fiction books I've ever read - The Forever War (not the space war
book).

The Forever War
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307279448/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_OWDy...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307279448/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_OWDyybR2B68S1)

~~~
reactor4
You've got to be kidding me. I started reading "The Forever War" (the space
war book) based on some comments I read on here and I assure you that there
wasn't any warning about the space war book.

~~~
madaxe_again
If you want a good space war book, Cixin Liu, Three Body Problem and sequels.

The Forever War (not the space war book) is excellent however.

~~~
madenine
The Forever War (the space war book) is also excellent

------
griffinkelly
I have a close friend that is is the Army Corps of Engineers at the dam.
Despite being deployed to the dam months ago, she's seen sporadic time at the
dam due to ISIS in the area. Every time they even get close the higher ups
decide to evacuate the American engineers, can't say what's been decided for
the others. During the recent Mosul Offensive, they were away from the dam the
entire time.

She was also telling me that during the time that ISIS held the dam, they
managed to booby trap the entire place. They had multiple Iraqi workers killed
in bathrooms from traps set. However, ISIS didn't manage any real structural
damage to the dam.

~~~
gpm
> ISIS didn't manage any real structural damage to the dam.

This makes it sound like they were intentionally trying to destroy the damn,
were they?

I'm not an expert but it seems like it should be easy for a military group
controlling a damn to blow it up if they wanted to. Though the article
mentions that it was built to be resistant against air strikes, so maybe not?

~~~
griffinkelly
She said all the booby trapping happened in the last days as the US was about
to recapture the dam, so it was hastily done. That being said, it did slow
operations as they then had to sweep the entire dam after they realized what
happened.

She said it would have been pretty difficult for them to cause significant
structural damage, because as mentioned it was 'bomb proof' and as stated they
were making money up until the very end in selling electricity.

------
verelo
Amazing read, much longer than I generally get hooked into.

I am astonished that "Grouting" (A term i find like many in the engineering
word makes a possibly questionable practice sound like a good idea) is a
functional, let alone acceptable solution, I can only begin to imagine what
the ground under that dam must look like after the last 20+ years of concrete
being poured into it.

~~~
rsync
"Amazing read, much longer than I generally get hooked into."

Please, please subscribe to the New Yorker in some fashion ... I personally
subscribe to the kindle version which is a very useful and workable format.

The New Yorker[1] regularly has very, very good long form articles that have
deepened my understanding of what I consider to be very important issues. Off
the top of my head, I can think of three such articles that stick out - their
long treatment of the deepwater horizon accident and the chemical dispersants
that were used in the cleanup, their decade-after-the-fact retrospective
article on Gore vs. Bush, and a more recent article on the police officer who
shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.

[1] Also the London Review of Books which is _excellent_ for long form current
events articles. Also book reviews.

~~~
pasta
Agreed.

If you believe that you should not read main stream news (like I do) this is
one of the sources to get 'good' news from.

~~~
techsupporter
I don't mean to knock on The New Yorker or cast aspersions on your choices,
but I have two rebuttals:

First, longform articles such as this one usually come months or years after
the fact and don't help with the primary mission of journalism, which is to
keep you abreast of the goings on around you. (Of everything from "what your
local government is doing and how that affects you" to "what the financial
markets in another continent are up to and how that affects you.") This is my
opinion, but I think that the pejorative "mainstream media" is often used as a
substitute for "media that doesn't write a story how I want it written."

Second, The New Yorker is owned by Advance Publications, which is about as
"mainstream" of media as you're going to find. One of their larger publishing
subsidiaries is Conde Nast, which publishes The New Yorker alongside
Architectural Digest, Vogue, Golf World, GQ, and several other publications.
You may also know them as the publisher of ArsTechnica. They also own more
than 40 newspapers.

Just my two cents, for what that's worth these days.

~~~
grzm
_longform articles such as this one usually come months or years after the
fact and don 't help with the primary mission of journalism, which is to keep
you abreast of the goings on around you_

I think there are many facets to the mission of journalism. In-depth and
investigative journalism are very important as well as being kept up-to-date
on what's happening in the day-to-day. In some cases I prefer these more in-
depth pieces as they have some perspective on how the events they're
describing are affected by historical context and how they are affecting
what's going on in current events. Consider the Woodward and Bernstein's
Watergate coverage or the Boston Globe's coverage of the child sex abuse by
Catholic priests in Boston.

Different events and issues can be served by different forms. For a piece like
this, I have a hard time imagining it being served better as a short piece of
a couple column inches in a paper or a 90 second segment on the evening news.
Not all events need coverage like this, of course, but it doesn't make the
long-form pieces any less an important and vital aspect of journalism.

~~~
techsupporter
> For a piece like this, I have a hard time imagining it being served better
> as a short piece of a couple column inches in a paper or a 90 second segment
> on the evening news. ... it doesn't make the long-form pieces any less an
> important and vital aspect of journalism.

I agree and I should have written more words that are like what you wrote. The
New Yorker is great for what it is, in-depth coverage of a complicated or
unfamiliar topic. I suppose my point was that other, more general sources
ought, in my opinion, to be part of a "balanced diet" of news coverage.

~~~
acjohnson55
There's some interesting criticism of whether "current events" news really
provides any actual societal value, or if it might actually do the opposite
[1].

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-
ro...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-
dobelli#top)

------
Hondor
Way down the bottom, we see the problem is solved for at least the next year:

"Early in 2016, under American prodding, the Iraqis reopened negotiations with
Trevi S.p.A., the Italian firm. In September, a team of engineers, hired at a
cost of three hundred million dollars, arrived at the dam to perform a crash
repair job. Their main task is to install updated equipment, designed to fill
the voids beneath the dam more precisely, and to repair the broken control
gate. Under the contract, the Italians will do the grouting for a year, and
then leave the equipment with their Iraqi counterparts. The engineers say that
they are confident they can prevent the dam’s foundation from washing away."

~~~
Someone
The sentence folllowing that starts with _But_. 'Crash repair job' also
doesn't instill confidence that it is a given this will work.

Also, this dam still is close to a war zone, if not in a war zone. That
updated equipment may not make it there, can get destroyed in an attack, or
the personnel doing the work can be 'persuaded' not to work or may outright be
killed.

What surprises me most about this story is that they kept delivering power to
the enemy, while they also could have let all or most of the water out. It
wouldn't surprise me if money or backstabbing ("we'll keep delivering
electricity if you focus on attacking your other enemies instead of on getting
back the dam from us") was involved there.

~~~
bogomipz
This has been a pattern that has been seen over and over in Iraq. Contractors
come in an build "state of the art" infrastructure to repair or replace
existing infrastructure. This in itself is not a problem per se. There are two
issues.

One is the local population lacks the training and expertise to run and
maintain this "state of the art" infrastructure. Not that they couldn't become
capable because they certainly could but their frame of reference is
maintaining 40 or 50 year old infrastructure.

The second issue is that they don't have the financial means of maintaing this
newly installed infrastructure. Their operating budget often can't accommodate
the maintenance of such state of that art infrastructure. What's good for a
first world contractors bottom line is not necessarily the best fit for a
third world country's utility company.

This book details a lot of this and is worth a look:

[https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Money-Wasted-Billions-
Corporate...](https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Money-Wasted-Billions-Corporate-
ebook/dp/B000SEQN3Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1482853876&sr=1-1&keywords=9780316030816)

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I'm not sure if your point is applicable here. This is a dam from 1986, not
some new fangled contraption no one understands. It has a known maintenance
schedule and is old school technology. The problem is, ISIS decided to murder
or chase off the staff who maintains the dam and didn't keep up with the work
it needs.

Worse, the construction was done "on the cheap" as dictated by the Hussein
regime. Instead of digging deeply into the delicate and soluble gypsum and
grouting properly, the engineers were forced to use a shallow blanket-grout
technique which simply requires more maintenance going forward as it failed to
stop dissolution. Grouting on this dam is done six days a week. That's right,
every day but Sunday since 1986. ISIS's pause of this created this crisis.

Contrary to your point, if it was done "first world style" it would be a much
more stable dam, but instead the Hussein regime was too busy buying palaces
and gold toilets to care too much about getting large scale projects right.
Iraqis now much pay forward the technical debt of the shallow blanket grout
until the dam is decommissioned. There is no alternative here and this dam
should be a study of autocratic regime's attempts at cost savings which
ultimately cost more in the long run and may eventually cause a human rights
disaster. I believe 1m people are at risk of drowning if this dam collapses.
These are non-trivial numbers.

~~~
huxley
Iraq had a lot of money back then and like in much of the developing world,
mega-projects were sought after (and not just by despots).

The Mosul Dam was not built cheaply, it was rushed to completion to meet some
idiotic deadline. The other options would likely not have cost much more
(especially considering maintenance), but it would have taken more time.

And it was "first-world style", the consultants and construction firms were
European just like the ones that built Kariba Dam. They had no problem
building it nor any problem cashing the cheques.

~~~
woodandsteel
The article says the dam was rushed because of the war with Iran that Saddam
Hussein started in 1979.

Saddam had the crazy idea that he could conquer the Middle East and make Iraq
into a world superpower. So he started a war with much larger Iran, the war
stalemated and went on for 8 years, with enormous loss in human lives, and
enormous debts piled up on the Iraqi side. That ended and Saddam invaded
Kuwait to get its oil riches, leading to the Gulf War which Iraq quickly lost.

Saddam still wanted to build an empire, so he prevented full nuclear arms
inspections to keep the rest of the Middle East afraid he still had a nuclear
arms program, and in fact planned to re-start it after the inspection and
sanctions program ended.

That lead to the Iraqi war, which Iraq quickly lost, and left Iraq so divided
and disorganized that ISIS could arise and take much of the country, including
temporarily taking the Mosul Dam. And the disorganized, corrupt government has
bungled dealing with the threat of the dam collapsing, and so we are in the
present, very dangerous situation.

So it all goes back to Saddam Hussein, and the generally poor political
situation in Iraq, and beyond that, I would say, the Middle East as a whole.

------
chris_7
> 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.

Not that destroying infrastructure and killing the power to a city of
civilians, despite ISIS control, is necessarily a good idea, but could they
not just cut the lines?

~~~
Tuna-Fish
> Not that destroying infrastructure and killing the power to a city of
> civilians, despite ISIS control, is necessarily a good idea, but could they
> not just cut the lines?

Do you know what happens when you run a turbine with nowhere to put the load?
750MW is enough to boil something like a kiloton of water every hour, that
energy needs to go _somewhere_.

~~~
viraptor
Honestly - no, I don't know what happens. Can you tell me? I mean without any
modifications that would specifically covert that power into heat, what would
happen with the lines cut? Something like the turbines melting, or welding
themselves to the structure?

~~~
snowwindwaves
The turbines are Francis type which means they keep spinning until the water
flow is stopped.

When a generator is disconnected from the power system without first removing
the power from the shaft then power in is greater than power out and the
result is an acceleration of the generator. Generators are built to be able to
withstand a certain maximum rotational speed without flying apart for a
certain duration of time before the bearings get too hot. Of course it can
operate at the normal speed forever, but the rated over speed might be twice
as fast for 10 minutes.

So when the power lines are cut the turbines and generators speed up until the
flow of water is stopped. Pictures of the Mosul dam show four surge tanks, one
for each turbine, so they can probably turn off the water in 5-10s.

Pelton turbines are used for higher head and the flow can be maintained
without turning the turbine by deflecting the water away from the runner.

I've commissioned about a dozen hydro electric power plants and opening the
breaker to simulate cutting the transmission line while making 10, 25,
50,75,100% of the power is standard procedure.

~~~
xg15
Thank you very much for the expert information. but that still doesn't make
sense to me. The article states they have two control gates and a spillway.
(one gate previously defunct but now repaired) So, shouldn't it be possible to
block off the turbines and open the control gates instead, so that the total
flow stays (roughly) the same?

Moreover, if the dam is indeed that easy to destabilize, letting ISIS control
the load seems equivalent to handing them a big red "trigger flood" button for
use at their discretion. Sure, _right now_ it's in their interest to keep the
dam intact - because they still control many parts of Mossul and need the
electricity. But "scorched earth" is not exactly a new concept and if the
operation in Mossul continues as planned and ISIS is driven out, they could
decide to cut the lines on their end to deliberately cause mechanical
failures.

~~~
snowwindwaves
I haven't re-read the article, but I recall the control gates were at the
bottom of the dam. Traditionally the spillway is at the top of the dam and on
one portiona there are gates which are operated hydraulically or by winches
that open to allow water to pass underneath and run down a specially shaped
(ogee shape) face of the dam. If for some reason the water level behind the
dam gets too high there can be a section of spillway with no gates that will
allow water to flow around the dam without the dam being overtopped in an
uncontrolled fashion.

The mosul dam is 113 m high and the article said they were operating the dam
with the water level 30m below the normal full level. Probably the sill of the
spillway is only 10 or less below the normal operating level, because if the
dam isn't full why would you want to spill.

The control gates at the bottom of the dam could have been primarily for
allowing sediment to be sluice out from behind the dam or to allow the
reservoir to be drained.

There is no guarantee the two control gates could pass as much flow as the
turbines. Who knows how they were sized.

As I tried to explain before, cutting the power lines shouldn't damage any
equipment. It effectively happens all the time due to natural causes, be they
tree branches falling on power lines, birds, squirrels, etc.

Flow through an orifice (sluice gate, control gate, turbine, etc) varies with
the square root of the pressure of water (the head), so a side effect of
operating the dam with 30 m less head (30% less!) is that the turbines would
be operating outside of their normal range and the control gates would pass
less flow than they would at the nominal head.

There was a terrible accident at a dam in russia that was caused by operating
the turbine outside of the normal range of pressure, and poor maintenance
(loose bolts holding the turbine down...):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sayano%E2%80%93Shushenska...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sayano%E2%80%93Shushenskaya_power_station_accident)

------
snowwindwaves
The Masonry dam in Washington state near Seattle also has/had this problem.
The geotechnical reports and conditions were ignored and the water flowed
under and around the dam, popping up in all kinds of places.

The dam was never able to be filled and is just called the masonry dam since
nobody wanted it named after them.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedar_River_(Washington)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedar_River_\(Washington\))

~~~
mynameisvlad
Masonry dam had quite a different problem which is just that there was too
much water and it couldn't keep up, so water spilled over the side about
6000ft away from the dam. The problem with the Mosul dam is that it's built on
soluble rock that could be swept away with enough pressure. Yes, too much
water is the cause of both failures, but they're quite different.

~~~
snowwindwaves
do you have a better link to information on Masonry dam? My information is
second hand from a hydro electric turbine expert. He clearly stated to me that
the dam was built in a location that was geotechnically unsuitable so water
flooded underground channels due to the pressure of the water behind the dam
and popped up all over the place. A nearby lake level raised a bunch. I might
have got the wrong link. "masonry dam" is hard to google, as intended.

~~~
mynameisvlad
Heh, I was originally going to ask you for more information before my comment
because the link wasn't the most descriptive on that incident, but briefly
mentions that it happened 6000 feet away from the dam, which got me curious. I
think had some more luck searching for "Boxley Creek 1918" or "Boxley Burst"
which was the name of the actual incident.
[http://www.historylink.org/File/2426](http://www.historylink.org/File/2426)
was the first result on Google.

------
unethical_ban
The caption of a picture says the reservoir holds 11 billion cubic FEET, but
the article earlier says METERS.

That's a magnitude of difference.

~~~
logicallee
I'm curious, were you calculating or using (or thinking about, had some train
of thought about) this information or did you just happen to notice the mixed
units? I mean because I can't picture either one or ten billion cubic feet of
water so it's just a very large number to me and I wouldn't notice that
difference.

~~~
abduhl
One billion cubic meters is a cubic kilometer - a cube with each side
measuring 1km. 11 of these would be a cube with ~2.25 km sides. Or slightly
less than a mile and a half per side.

~~~
logicallee
I never thought about the fact that a billion is "just" a thousand times a
thousand times a thousand.

So I thought of something I could picture a thousand of - for example
millimeters. A thousand mm is just 1 meter, so I can easily see/picture a
billion of something (cubic millimeters of air) right in front of me (as 1m x
1m x 1m). Neat!

~~~
grzm
The _Powers of Ten_ film comes to mind, helps put things in perspective as
well.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Ten_(film)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Ten_\(film\))

It's a classic, by Charles and Ray Eames.

------
xg15
Slightly off-topic:

> _Up close, the work is wet, improvisatory, and deeply inexact. [...] Like
> his boss, Jabouri has worked at the dam since he was a young engineering
> graduate. Now, he told me, he is as sensitive to the dam’s changes as the
> electronic gear buzzing around him. [...]

“We feel our way through,” Jabouri said, standing by the pump. Generally,
smaller cavities require thinner grout, so Jabouri started with a milky
solution and increased its thickness as the void took more. Finally, after
several hours, he stopped; his intuition, aided by the pressure gauges, told
him that the cavity was full._

The irony saddens me that, if you replaced that worker and his human lifetime
of knowledge with a "data-driven control system" and his intuition with a
"machine learning algorithm", we would all hail the result as the pinnacle of
technology in mainantence systems - even though the data and actual descision
making would be almost the same...

~~~
tw04
What happens if Jabouri gets hit by a bus? I love a good craftsman as much as
anyone, but when the lives of that many people rely on one person, you're just
asking for a disaster.

~~~
awinder
I'm assuming you'd deal with bus factor as everyone else who has ever relied
on human labor has done -- training, more than 1 person who knows how to do a
given job, etc. The world's still buzzing even though we've lived through
thousands of years of people dying, I think we've had enough time to figure
this one out.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
It's not like the problem of training disappears with machine learning. What
if the person maintaining the ML algorithm is hit by a bus? What if the
algorithm needs adapting? etc.

~~~
tw04
Then someone else picks up the code and continues maintaining it. You can read
through documentation and existing code. You can't extract information from a
dead guys brain...

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
What stops a human from documenting a process in writing?

~~~
hueving
Intuition is pretty hard to document.

------
taspeotis
Previous discussion [1].

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11209228](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11209228)

~~~
jamesfe
I came here to note this. People bring this up every year or so - when I was
in Iraq in 2006, this was an issue of the "any moment they could all die" sort
but nobody seems to care enough to fix it since there isn't a firm timeline
for the dam failure. Also, there's that whole war thing going on.

------
Fiahil
> In private, some Iraqis pose conspiracy theories. “I know a lot of Iraqis
> who think this is just a big psyops operation by the U.S. government—senior
> officials, not just Iraqis on the street,”

Of course. When a foreign army invade your country, then proceed to criticize
your infrastructure, they make themselves difficult to listen to. Even if they
are right. If Iraqis had concerns wouldn't they involved third party
inspections from non-American firms?

~~~
woodandsteel
What the Iraqis should do is not just believe every conspiracy theory that
comes along, but carefully investigate each one to see if it makes sense. From
what I understand, they don't generally do this.

------
kiba
It's hard to figure out if this event is unlikely or likely to happen.

But I won't be surprised to wake up tomorrow to learn that there's a
humanitarian crisis in Iraq.

~~~
nothrabannosir
Without action, it's certain it will happen. The question is not if, but when.

~~~
snowwindwaves
It sounds like they can keep grouting forever

------
exabrial
I'm curious to what ratio an abusive regime is affected by general sanctions
vs the populace under its authoritarian control. Sad to see so many people
living in poverty from a dictator, then sanctions, then an invasion, now ISIS
(And a dam apparently).

I don't know what the solution is, but that area of the world just cannot find
peace.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
> I'm curious to what ratio an abusive regime is affected by general sanctions
> vs the populace under its authoritarian control.

Inevitably the sanctions will hurt the general populace more than the people
in power. However, that might reduce the popularity of the leader and
ultimately help their downfall, perhaps.

~~~
rwallace
Or it might not. It might make the populace more isolated, bitter and
paranoid, more likely to stand by the leader against the perceived evil of the
rest of the world. Decades of sanctions against Cuba and North Korea just
entrenched the respective regimes more tightly.

------
jokoon
I don't understand, can't they slowly empty the lake behind the dam?

~~~
rem1313
The built up water is a form of potential energy and draining it would mean it
is wasted.

~~~
bkbolte
I don't think wasting energy is the major concern in this situation

------
lldata
A quick calculation of what it would take to replace the dam with solar
panels:

According to wikipedia the dam produces 1052MW. Let's call it 1GW.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosul_Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosul_Dam)

According to quora you need about 10000m2 or one 1ha to produce 1MW. So 1000 *
10000m2 = 10km2 to produce 1GW.

I wonder how big the lake is? Could solar panels installed in the drained lake
- theoretically - provide the same or more energy than the dam?

Of course energy storage is a major part of water power and it is not taken
into account above. On the other hand a decentralized power grid is one of the
major advantages of solar (especially in an unstable country) and that is not
taken into account either.

~~~
impostervt
But the damn isn't there just to provide power. Remember back when it was
built Iraq exported power, in the form of oil.

It's also there to regulate the flow of the river, which commonly floods the
surrounding, crop-growing region.

~~~
lldata
Yes, but according to what I can read the lake is filled to 8km3 capacity,
with 3km3 capacity for flood regulation.

So wouldn't a much smaller dam be sufficient for flood regulation?

------
krick
I rarely like The New Yorker writings, but this is actually a good one.
Importantly, because it starts with short description of a whole, and then
goes into the detail. Most The New Yorker writers consider it ok to start (and
continue) the article with something like: "On a warm sunny autumn day he was
sitting in the park, wearing his grey merino-wool polo shirt and khaki pants".

The only thing I'd like to be explained more thoroughly: what actually is this
dam? I.e., how does it work? Going to wikipedia I see a whole list of
different types of dams, and it is not clear to me, what does this specific
construction in the article actually do, and how its failure would cause a
tsunami-like wave.

------
magaman69
if isis can ruin more dams; why arent they a bigger problem?

~~~
jpkeisala
Because that would not make as good headline.

------
marcusgarvey
The Lewisville Dam near Dallas, Texas is also one to watch, although the scale
of a potential disaster is much smaller and something is being done about it.
[http://interactives.dallasnews.com/2015/lewisville-
dam/](http://interactives.dallasnews.com/2015/lewisville-dam/)

------
rdc12
Sadly there is also a dam in Africa, in similar dire position, due to being
built on a geologically unsuitable site.

[1] [http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/one-of-africas-
bigges...](http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/one-of-africas-biggest-dams-
is-falling-apart)

------
livestyle
This is eerily similar to Bitter Lake..
[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x35szal](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x35szal)

------
disposablezero
A bigger problem than both: the 100-1000x atmospheric mass in methane
calthrates bubbling up from the ESAS that have the potential to push climate
change beyond +6 ℃. Get ready for high food prices, more failed states (and
more mob armed cults), regional WMD wars and mass exoduses.

It sounds rhetorical and impossible at first glance if the evidence including
satellite measurements and field observations weren't so definitive. Preppers
don't sound so insane at first but they're probably not thinking about
sustainable semi/off-grid living in a radically-altered climate.

------
menzoic
Article from the future? Jan 2nd, 2017

~~~
grzm
It's the issue date of the magazine it appears in, which is why it says
"January 2, 2017 Issue".

------
yalogin
The saddest part of the article is the US tried to blow the dam up during the
gulf war. Why? That is as brutal as dropping the nukes on Japan.

~~~
berntb
Uh, what article are you reading? Or do you think bombing a generator is to
"blow up the dam"?

The quote is: "the dam had been built to survive an aerial bombardment. (In
fact, during the Gulf War, American jets bombed its generator, but the dam
remained intact.)"

(A dam with bad air defense ought to be an easy target, considering all the
emphasis the Americans puts into getting through lots of cement -- and that
dams were bombed already during WWII.)

Edit: The shocking part was how the US found out about how much the sanctions
had damaged the country -- and then poured billions into fixing it. The US
politicians might waste even more than my native ones.

~~~
jimnotgym
bombed generator not dam....bombing dams was banned under the Geneva
conventions.

"According to Article 56 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva
Conventions, “works or installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams,
dikes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object
of attack, even when these objects are military objectives, if such attack may
cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the
civilian population.”

~~~
dmurray
That was never ratified by the USA or ISIS, both reserving their right to blow
up dams like this one.

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AlexCoventry
Is there a summary of the main risks? Sounds interesting but I don't have time
for New Yorker-style reporting.

~~~
RandomOpinion
" _... Completed in 1984, the dam sits on a foundation of soluble rock. To
keep it stable, hundreds of employees have to work around the clock, pumping a
cement mixture into the earth below. Without continuous maintenance, the rock
beneath would wash away, causing the dam to sink and then break apart. But
Iraq’s recent history has not been conducive to that kind of vigilance.

...

In February, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad issued a warning of the consequences
of a breach in the dam. For a statement written by diplomats, it is
extraordinarily blunt. 'Mosul Dam faces a serious and unprecedented risk of
catastrophic failure with little warning,' it said. Soon afterward, the United
Nations released its own warning, predicting that 'hundreds of thousands of
people could be killed' if the dam failed. Iraq’s leaders, apparently fearful
of public reaction, have refused to acknowledge the extent of the danger. But
Alwash told me that nearly everyone outside the Iraqi government who has
examined the dam believes that time is running out: in the spring, snowmelt
flows into the Tigris, putting immense pressure on the retaining wall.

If the dam ruptured, it would likely cause a catastrophe of Biblical
proportions, loosing a wave as high as a hundred feet that would roll down the
Tigris, swallowing everything in its path for more than a hundred miles. Large
parts of Mosul would be submerged in less than three hours. Along the
riverbanks, towns and cities containing the heart of Iraq’s population would
be flooded; in four days, a wave as high as sixteen feet would crash into
Baghdad, a city of six million people. 'If there is a breach in the dam, there
will be no warning,' Alwash said. ..._"

~~~
vacri
It's really weird to see 'loosing' used in the correct manner online...

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dajohnson89
Sorry if this is a dumb question. TBH I didn't rtfa. But if the dam needs a
constant infusion of concrete in order to not fail, why wasn't anything done
to evacuate the area and gracefully (sic) fail the dam in the first place?

~~~
ckarmann
You would have to evacuate Mosul (1.7 million people) and probably also
Baghdad (7 millions), all in a country thorn by war where refugee camps are
already bursting with people. Plus of course the entity that control Mosul
(ISIS) is not keen on letting civilians go given their value as human shields.

~~~
dajohnson89
But this issue with the dam was apparent before ISIS, no?

~~~
PhasmaFelis
The constant infusion of concrete isn't an emergency measure. It's how the dam
was intended to operate. The problem (from the planners' point of view,
anyway) isn't that it requires constant grouting, it's that it _stopped
getting_ constant grouting.

~~~
dajohnson89
My broader point is that a dam which requires constant grouting seems like a
pretty bad idea.

~~~
VLM
All dams require maintenance or they fail. You are correct in that its merely
a question of magnitude. Completely abandoned, Hoover Dam for example would
last a lot longer, but hardly forever. Where the line is drawn is pretty
arbitrary, and if the alternative is the people have no electricity or
irrigation water so they riot and kill you ... Saddam was famous for the stick
but sometimes he used the carrot to keep his country together. No one is
keeping it together now, of course.

