121–130 of 255 posts
Drain it. Seriously. Any other response is either unrealistically expensive/complicated or reckless. Sure, the Italian company could maintain it if they aren't attacked by ISIS, but that is a big if when failure is immanent.
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Surprised that some big infrastructure company like Halli or Bechtel didn't see an opportunity to scheme some business from this.
Rebuilding Mosul is more lucrative that maintenance on Mosul dam?
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To play devil's advocate here, any competent military would consider possibilities like this. "War is hell" is said so often these days as to be blasé, but it really is true.
Are you saying that any competent military would consider racking up a civilian death toll on the order of the Auschwitz death camp in the matter of days? Thank god the US military isn't competent then.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprised that some big infrastructure company like Halli or Bechtel didn't see an opportunity to scheme some business from this.
Rebuilding Mosul is more lucrative that maintenance on Mosul dam?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To play devil's advocate here, any competent military would consider possibilities like this. "War is hell" is said so often these days as to be blasé, but it really is true.
Are you saying that any competent military would consider racking up a civilian death toll on the order of the Auschwitz death camp in the matter of days? Thank god the US military isn't competent then.
So they were working on fixing this but the west imposed sanctions in the 90s and stopped work. "There is no permanent solution except building another dam,” Ansari said. A second structure, the Badush dam, was started 20km downstream, to prevent a catastrophe in the event of the Mosul dam’s failure. But work on Badush halted in the 1990s because of the pressure of sanctions, leaving it only 40% complete."
Interesting that you can find a way to blame this on the West when Saddam could just have complied with the UN (who imposed the sanctions, not the "West"), had the sactions removed, and given his people a better life.
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"This siphon effect relies on atmospheric pressure to allow the pressure and pressure potential energy to drop as the water travels upward inside the sealed pipe. But eventually the pressure of the rising water reaches zero and no further reductions in pressure and pressure potential energy are possible. That failure of the siphon effect occurs when the water is about 30 feet (10 meters) above the higher container. Y…
It's not atmospheric pressure: "Here we report an experiment of a siphon operating at sea level at a height of 15 m, well above 10 m. Prior degassing of the water prevented cavitation. This experiment provides conclusive evidence that siphons operate through gravity and molecular cohesion." http://www.nature.com/articles/srep16790
"""Extrapolating these results from even the most conservative experimental measurements of the tension under which cavitation occurs it is possible that the cohesive strength of fully degassed water is able to support a continuous vertical column greater than several hundred meters. While the experiment performed here did not reach anywhere near the absolute limit predicted it does shed light on the stability of flowing water under tensile stress and the possibility of constructing apparatus of suitable dimensions to test such a limit. (...) In view of the many anomalies of bulk water, it would be interesting to explore the physical properties of water in the negative pressure regime of a siphon above 10 m."""
So, as long as we don't break the water column by bubbles (or other impurities in the water that will lead to formations of bubbles on their surface) we could empty the Mosul dam via a siphon.
That's a fascinating result! We only have to remove the rocks, the fish and put the dam under high-vacuum for outgassing for a few weeks ;-). If we don't do that, the old atmospheric pressure model holds, and the siphon will be limited to 10 metres, 30 ft.
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He might have killed the people who reported to him, who in turn did everything to make that project happen, future cost and risk be damned.
"To understand his tantrum one must understand the kinship he feels with the great men of history, with history itself. Lack of reverence for an image of Copernicus might suggest a lack of reverence for Saddam." From : http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/tales-of... Dictators are violent, not stupid. They understand risks, and make decisions like any other leader.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_%281937%29
I think it would have been a foolishly courageous engineer who told Saddam that his dam project wasn't going to work...
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I would imagine siphoning might be a simple enough process and could be setup in multiple places along the dam to avoid the asymmetric draining issues mentioned further in the discussion here on hacker news.
You can syphon up about 30ft. The dam is 371 ft.