41–50 of 255 posts
Something tells me they want to use the risk of a failing dam as a weapon to pursue Mosul population to rise against ISIS. Or that they just don't care if 1M+ died in an ISIS stronghold.
Those guys are crazy. Not very competent, but crazy.
Iraq was altogether a different country when it was built, but infrastructure that can fail killing 1M people unless maintained 24/7 by a 300 person crew sounds like it has way too many failure scenario for comfort. AFAIK you can abandon the Hoover dam and it will still be there in 500 years. It looks like the Mosul dam engineers couldn't achieve remotely the same result given the soil it's built on, but there must h…
My understanding: Russian engineers warned Saddam it could not be built there, but he ordered it done anyway to partially cut off Kurdish rebel movement by creating a lake. See eg https://web.archive.org/web/20140219214451/http://www.shafaa... The whole thing is an utter clusterfuck. An American civil engineering prof is saying the sole possible solution is a cutoff wall that, by the way, has to not only be 800 ft be…
> 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.
EDIT: Your last link is the same as the submission.
> The dam was designed by a Swiss firm of consultants and built by a German-Italian consortium in 1984. Water began seeping through in 1986, when it became apparent that the geological issues were worse than the consultants had predicted. I doubt that this was an innocent failure on their part. There was a huge financial incentive for these firms to find some way to validate this project. Successive foreign consultan…
Yes. Maybe there is evidence of manipulation of data , but who will bring the Italian/Swiss/German companies to justice ? Iraq ? US? EU? This happened 30 years ago, some people might not even be alive..
Iraq was altogether a different country when it was built, but infrastructure that can fail killing 1M people unless maintained 24/7 by a 300 person crew sounds like it has way too many failure scenario for comfort. AFAIK you can abandon the Hoover dam and it will still be there in 500 years. It looks like the Mosul dam engineers couldn't achieve remotely the same result given the soil it's built on, but there must h…
If you wanted to know why it's so dangerous, it still doesn't help comparing the dangerous one with your favorite and safe dam.
Earlier news give more context, the Iraq and US official warning, now the former engineers are even more worried than Iraq and US officials who did make explicit warnings, which certainly means it's really critical:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/29/iraq-us-issue-w...
And the "explanation" is, the decision to build it was from the start political, not guided by the safety concerns:
"The dam, the largest in Iraq, has had structural problems since its construction in the 1980s. The Saddam Hussein regime pressed on with it in the face of warnings from geologists that it was being built on weak, water-soluble rock such as gypsum and anhydrite.
A report by a panel of Iraqi and Swedish geologists and engineers last year described it as “the most dangerous dam in the world”, saying its very construction was a “mystery” in view of the unfavourable geology. Before it was built, the report said, “all the studies expressed a clear concern on the fact that this region suffers from extensive presence of soluble rock formations that might undermine the safety of a high dam of a large reservoir such as Mosul dam.”"
And the safety-increasing project was started even 20 years ago, but the sanctions and the wars were stronger:
"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."
This picture on wikipedia of the dam has a really beautiful contrast between the water and the land around it ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ea/Mo... ) Also draws attention to the fact that there's a massive amount of water behind the dam. edit: wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosul_Dam , to save you the effort of googling :)
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 article:
https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2016/03/mosuld...
> The dam was designed by a Swiss firm of consultants and built by a German-Italian consortium in 1984. Water began seeping through in 1986, when it became apparent that the geological issues were worse than the consultants had predicted. I doubt that this was an innocent failure on their part. There was a huge financial incentive for these firms to find some way to validate this project. Successive foreign consultan…
"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."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Maybe there is evidence of manipulation of data , but who will bring the Italian/Swiss/German companies to justice ? Iraq ? US? EU? This happened 30 years ago, some people might not even be alive..
30 years is nothing in infrastructure terms, if the companies still have money in the bank, and they are guilty of something then of course they should pay, that's the business they chose to be in!
