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 have been overwhelming reasons to build it despite the risks...
> AFAIK you can abandon the Hoover dam and it will still be there in 500 years.
Yes, Hoover dam is quite the civil engineering and project management feat. It's structural lifespan in the absence of maintenance (the turbines will go inoperative in months to years in the absence of maintenance) is estimated in the thousands of years range. [1]
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
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 below the embankment but is significantly deeper than any other such cutoff wall ever built. And it must be constructed in the middle of Iraq under a dam in serious danger of collapsing.
And finally another interesting article; the alternative to a cutoff wall is building a second $2B dam downstream. There's a good graphic half way down the article of the problems with the Mosul dam. Of course, that's not just $2B but at minimum several years away...
According to your last link, they actually began building a second dam further downstream in the 90s:
> 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.
What's the use in comparing that dam with that another? They have absolutely nothing in common.
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:
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."
dude, it sounds like there is nothing that would help the dangerous dam. Nobody thinks that just words are going to help, but learning more about a dams in general (such as the hoover) does illuminate the the issue even if it doesn't help.
du-de viggity, somebody else (yread) here posted, but outside of this thread, don't ask why, that Hoover dam also had to be grouted after it was finished:
Now imagine that there wasn't peace at that time but that people couldn't even get enough food and medicine, and that at the time this should have been finished some 500,000 kids died, like in Iraq:
Also Iraqi engineers often had to be creative for a lot of Saddam's rule because of sanctions. I say that to add to the "oh shit list" of things not looking good for Mosul, as well as to give due praise for managing to make it work this long despite the challenges x0x0 pointed out.
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 have been overwhelming reasons to build it despite the risks...