201–210 of 255 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most dictators tend to behave in ways that doesn't exactly encourage their minions to be open and honest with them - the unhappy outcome of the 1937 Census in the Soviet Union being a good example: 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...
>>I think it would have been a foolishly courageous engineer who told Saddam that his dam project wasn't going to work... That isn't how it works. You don't just walk up to the dictator and troll him/her in the face about their project. You discuss engineering merits/demerits, risks/advantages make a brief conclusion and leave it there. You leave the decision to the them. Its a totally different thing for them to neg…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do I think you'll find 1M people in America who support Obama's administration? Um, yes... He was elected by about half the population, after all. I can easily find 1M people who still prefer to have him as President. Heck, right now with our current frontrunners, there's people who'd like to have another 4 or 8 years of Obama rather than Trump or Hillary. Now with Mosul, we're talking about 1M people. That's far, fa…
Commenters are required to post civilly and substantively, or not at all. It's bad enough that you are uncivil to your fellow users, and worse that you start religious flamewars. But blaming a million people for their own prospective drowning because you say they're Isis supporters (a ridiculous claim about a group known to terrorize the populations it rules over), and therefore have it coming to them, is far outside…
I don't see that he's 'blaming a million people for their own prospective drowning,' but rather blaming a million people for their current government, which is something very different.
I don't particularly agree with either his argument or his style of expression, but I believe that he's very much within the norms of HN, and certainly doesn't deserve to be banned for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How difficult is it to blow up the dam such that the water rushes out? I mean bombing a place to kill people is easy, but I have no idea if you have to hit specific spots on the dam or whether it is enough to just hit any area.
The allies (the RAF) had fairly specialized bombs in WWII to blow dams. They would fly in from upstream and drop a bomb shaped like a barrel (picture a barrel of oil) from very low altitude. The bomb would skip along the surface as it lost momentum and then sink close to the dam wall. At a certain pressure it would blow and take advantage of the hydrostatic shock to break up the wall. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
To give some sense of the scale of the disaster that would follow a failure, the US considered bombing that dam and releasing all that water in response to a potential chemical attack on US troops during Gulf War I, according to Colin Powell ( http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/script_b.html - search for dams).
They considered an attack that would have killed ~1M people, presumably mainly civilians? sigh smh
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any satellite view gives you even better idea about the amount of the water and the danger for Mosul: http://i.imgur.com/Fg847Xe.jpg And for the size, even when you see the whole Mediterranean, the lake is still visible (on the right)! http://i.imgur.com/5ktcQEr.jpg The areas affected in Mosul, the location of other cities that are affected and the structure of the dam are successfully presented in the Guardian's art…
i just want to point out that the fail-safe was abandoned due to sanctions against Iraq. I hope people remember things like this when they openly promote sanctions against countries whose leaders we disagree with. We aren't hurting the leaders, we're hurting the citizenry. And we are certainly not bringing them to our side. We are causing real suffering and death of innocent people. for example, clinton's iraq sancti…
If the dam breaks, ISIS will be judged responsible for more deaths than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maintenance on the dam almost entirely stopped when ISIS took over, and the grouting machines required for maintaining it were looted. And the dead will be Sunni Muslims--their own "citizens", those who didn't flee when ISIS took control of Mosul. It will be the lasting legacy of ISIS. Surely th…
Just a guess, really, but on an international level, we'll know the truth. But, I'm guessing this dam(n) failure will be yet another successful recruiting tool for ISIS and the like.
Anyone with a head for middle-eastern politics and terrorist recruiting tactics around to respond?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Step 1: Randomly select a large portion of the assembled party as enemies of the state / party.
Step 2: Enlist the remaining party members to execute the first.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
It's a formula even more twisted than Hitler and Stalin.
Nine minutes: https://youtu.be/CR1X3zV6X5Y
The circumstances of the failure are themselves instructive. Poor planning, poor design, ignored engineering warnings (and banishment of the engineer in question), inadequate safety presentations, a true monster of a storm (over 1 meter of water in 24 hours), miscommunications, failed communications, no downstream warning system, the inevitable dam failure, and a further cascade of additional dam failures, including many of which were blasted open with artillery.
Only a relatively small number of the deaths were direcectly precipitated by the flooding. Many resulted from disease and starvation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam?wprov=sfla1
The Mosul Dam could potentially dwarf this tragedy.
Are there any articles about how/why the sluice gates are seized? Is it sediment blocking them? Or did something mechanical break? I would like to hear from an engineer. I know that the US Corps of Engineers has probably been to it during the various wars. I know the overall problem is the porous rock and whole dam collapsing (which is horrible for the locals), I am just curious what the best way to relieve the press…
Software engineer here (chuckle). I spent a lot of time in Iraq, some of that time guarding infrastructure. The thing about most of that stuff -- and my guess in this case -- is that the machinery is rusted. The door may be physically jammed by silt or something, as well, but I would put my money on the machinery to open the doors being rusted or otherwise destroyed/removed by looters. This is the case with the vast…
Oh :)
Not a cultural/religious phenomena. That is just a sarcastic way to ignore someone. This way of passive resistance is kinder (and safer in context) than to outright say "piss off". Everything is considered will of God in Islam anyways - from someone moving a finger to celestial events.
When an Arab tells you "if it's the will of God" or "tomorrow" you are most likely on your own, nothing is going to get done. True for most of the muslims; more true for most of the Arabs. Source: a muslim.