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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I often find when I do get lost in an article, it's common to be something from the New Yorker. The articles are very well written and often explore the story in a way that is factual and creative that I really enjoy. Reading "Precedent and Prologue" (Gore V's bush supreme court article) I got so interested in the judicial activism concept and ended up lost on Wikipedia for a few hours bouncing around related article…
it's gotten a lot of buzz lately, including on HN, but if you're interested in going down the gaddafi hole a bit further i'd recommend the recent adam curtis film, hypernormalisation. his films tend to be a bit like getting lost in a wikipedia hole in their own right, though.
Seconded
Then watch Only The Dead (see the end of a war) by an australian bloke
> 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 g…
> 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 .
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?
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?
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.
But this issue with the dam was apparent before ISIS, no?
> 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 g…
> 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 .
You could use it to boil some of the water away? A win/win if you're not a civilian relying on the power that is.
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.
"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 artic…
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.
> 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 .
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?
That's exactly right. Either that or a catastrophic mechanical failure. It's really not an experiment you want to do. One way or another, it would be both ugly and irreversible.