The viability of the massive Mosul Dam is in growing doubt. After US warnings were dismissed by current Iraqi officials as overblown, the engineers responsible for building the dam say that the situation is even worse than the US was saying.
ISIS briefly captured the dam over a year ago, and while it was recovered almost immediately, that engineers warn that the Iraqi government has not replaced any machinery since, and has operated on a skeleton crew, meaning the dam has been getting more damaged and more dangerous by the day.
Previous reports suggested that if the dam broke, several hundred thousand people could be killed in Mosul. The engineers are now saying that if it goes, a 20 meter-high flood of water could roll through Mosul and down the Tigris valley, killing upward of a million people.
Faced with the growing risk, and the growing recognition that the civilians killed wouldn’t just be in ISIS-occupied Mosul, the Iraqi government has announced it signed a deal with Italy’s Trevi group to “maintain” the dam, though they did not indicate what the starting date would be for the deal.
The government is still controlled by Shia, Mosul is mostly Sunni and has been taken over by ISIL so probably the government is just hoping the city will drown.
It’s another 9/11-like opportunity which won’t be wasted by the CIA. I wonder if the thermite is already in place.
The photo on the home page today links to a Guardian article on this subject. Turns out the dam never should have been built, mainly due to the porous bedrock that requires constant grout injections. The project was pushed by a government bureaucrat and Mosul native in order to a) justify his own job and b) create make-work jobs for others in his hometown.
There is a similar boondoggle here in the US — the “Old River Control Project'” that keeps the Mississippi River in its current channel. It nearly failed in 1973; when it finally does so, the result will be at least as disastrous as the inevitable failure of the Mosul Dam..