Mosul Dam sluice gates jammed shut VERY dangerous

[Anthea]

Rudaw

Is Mosul Dam the ultimate threat against Iraq?

DOHUK, Kurdistan Region – ”To be or not to be,” seems to be an increasingly valid question nowadays about the existence of Iraq’s largest Mosul Dam -- also called a “time bomb” by US army reports in the past decade.

And like most existential questions, the answer depends on whom you ask: Iraq’s government has repeatedly denied that the 3.65 kilometer-long dam would run the risk of collapsing, any time soon.

Baghdad says the dam functions, as it should, according to the country’s ministry of resources.

But commander of US troops in Iraq, Lt. General Sean MacFarland has recently said, “if the dam was in the States, it would probably be shut down.”

The dam came into international spotlight in the chaotic days of August 2014 when it was briefly captured by vengeful militants of the ISIS. Many feared the group would blast the dam to further destabilize the country by flooding the capital and several cities along the way.

But the fears were not realized as Peshmarga forces heavily supported by US airpower quickly pushed back the militants before they were able to do any harm.

If the dam is blasted or collapses for any reason, the result will be calamitous, according to several studies including US army report on January 30: Mosul city, with over a million inhabitants, will be flooded with over 24 meters high waves within just four hours after the collapse. Within the next 42 hours, Baghdad will also be flooded with 5 meters high waves.

In fact the core reason behind building the dam in 1981 was not producing electricity alone-- although it generates some 750 megawatts-- but also protecting Baghdad, 450 kilometers southeast of the dam, from potential overflow of the Tigris River.

The dam, built by a German-Italian consortium, was constructed on unsteady bedrock of gypsum, which required constant infusion of grout to prevent its collapse.

Over the last 30 years the foundation of the dam has continually been grouted six days a week, according to Muhseen Hasan who has worked at the dam for the past 34 years.

“There are 380 people working here, in two shifts, to make sure the foundation doesn’t erode,” Hasan told Rudaw and added that the endless grouting costs $30 million a month.

Hasan said during the six-week ISIS takeover of the dam in August 2014, it was not maintained which apparently led US and Peshmarga forces to take immediate action and drive out the militants.

He said even after the recapture, the grouting did not start immediately as the cement factory was still under ISIS control.

In 2015 after repeated warnings from US army in the country, Iraq agreed to take a $200 million loan from the World Bank to address the threat, but the consulted Italian group which was assigned the task has not done much since because of security threats posed by ISIS.

Italy has announced it plans to deploy a military unit of 450 men to protect the Trevi Group working on the dam.

Whether the group can prevent the giant earth walls from collapsing remains to be seen. For now however skeptics still fear the worst.

Professor Nazir Alansari from the Swedish Lulea University, who has studied the Mosul Dam for years, believes the best solution is to construct another dam on Tigris and shut the Mosul Dam “once and for all.”

In 1988 the Iraqi government started building a second dam on the Tigris in northwest of Mosul amid growing public concern. The construction of Badosh Dam was abandoned in 1991, although an estimated 40 percent of the work had already been done, as Iraq plunged into the First Gulf War with the subsequent economic sanctions preventing the government to complete the project.

“The government should immediately finish the Badosh Dam since as I see it, it is the only way one can guarantee that a catastrophe will not take place,” Alansari said.

A report from the US Army Corps of Engineers in 2003 which calls the Mosul Dam “a time bomb”, prepares for the worst: “the flood would kill a half a million people immediately, while the aftershocks, such as power outage and drought, would kill many more.”

http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/220220164

Anthea: US Army Engineers called the Mosul Dam “a time bomb” in 2003 - wonder how much it has deteriorated since then

[Piling]

Pessimistic predictions about the dam :

http://photos.state.gov/libraries/iraq/ ... nglish.pdf

[Anthea]

Pessimistic predictions about the dam :

http://photos.state.gov/libraries/iraq/ ... nglish.pdf

Flood water could reach depths greater than 45 feet in some parts of Mosul City in as little as one to four hours, giving residents little time to flee.

This is terrifying

On the good side - ISIS are unlikely to destroy the dam as long as they remain in Mosul

On the bad side - given the amount of damage that would be caused by ISIS destroying the dam (especially in it's current weakened state) - I strongly suggest ISIS be allowed to remain in Mosul

[Anthea]

The Battle for Mosul Has Begun

ISIS is under air, ground, and cyber attack as Iraqi and coalition troops encircle the group’s final stronghold in Iraq, the Joint Chiefs chairman says.

WASHINGTON — The battle for Mosul ultimately will be the biggest U.S. operation in Iraq since the end of the last war.

That was Monday’s message from Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, who said multinational forces have begun to cut off the city’s supply and communications lines, and to encircle and isolate Islamic State fighters with cyber and air and ground attacks. Some coalition forces are already going after ISIS inside Mosul, and the final thrust to retake it should be expected sooner than the distant future, Dunford said.

Carter and Dunford spoke just a few days after President Barack Obama said he directed the military to continue to “accelerate” the war against ISIS “on all fronts.”

U.S. leaders say Mosul, along with the Syrian city of Raqqa, is the heart and headquarters of ISIS. Coalition assaults on these cities, and replacing ISIS with local, vetted leaders, will break the group’s grip on Iraqi territory and end its ability to inspire or direct terrorist attacks abroad.

Rather than sending brigades of U.S. forces to reinvade Mosul, the Obama administration has deployed special operators to target ISIS leaders and dispatched thousands of advisors, who have spent months preparing Iraqi, Kurd, and other local forces to do the job. The strategy has drawn blistering criticism from seasoned diplomats, former generals, and Republican leaders and presidential candidates, who have argued that greater U.S. military intervention could have broken ISIS sooner and saved innocents.

Still, the push into Mosul will require more American forces than were involved in the recent retaking of the southern Iraqi city of Ramadi, and will be shaped by lessons from that earlier campaign. Carter said he expected Americans to provide more logistics and “bridging” forces; Dunford said U.S. and Iraqi troops are preparing logistics and resupply points for Iraqi fighters as they make their way into the city.

“The operations against Mosul have already started,” Dunford said at the Pentagon on Monday. “In other words, you know, we’re isolating Mosul, even as we speak—the same thing with Raqqa. So it is not something that will happen in the deep, deep future.”

“People have confused, maybe, ‘When would Mosul be secure?’ with ‘When will operations start?’ I would tell you both, both in terms of the cyber capability as the secretary spoke about as well as operations to cut the line of communications and begin to go after some of the targets in and around Mosul, those operations have already started,” Dunford said.

Dunford said Iraqi military leaders have presented their plan for attacking Mosul to Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, the senior American commander in their country. “And now there is a process going on where Gen. MacFarland is looking at the Iraqi plan, working with [U.S. Central Command] to make recommendations as to what we can do.”

“I, like the secretary, think we would do more in Mosul than Ramadi just because of the order of magnitude of the operation in Mosul would indicate to me that we would have more U.S. support in Mosul than we did in Ramadi,” said Dunford.

Carter said the fight is being affected by the additional “expeditionary targeting force” of special operators the Pentagon deployed last year, but declined to say how. The group was sent to to conduct specialized raids, kill high-ranking terrorists, free hostages, and “seize places and people.” At the time, U.S. officials said the group’s missions would remain largely secret; virtually no information has since been released. On Monday, CNN reported only that the U.S. Army’s Delta Force had begun operations.

“The only thing I’ll say is the ETF is in position, it is having an effect and operating, and I expect it to be a very effective part of our acceleration campaign. I don’t have any more on that,” said Carter.

Carter formally announced that Lt. Gen. Raymond “Tony” Thomas would take command of U.S. Special Operations Command, succeeding Gen. Joseph Votel, whom Defense One first reported was the president’s choice to take over U.S. Central Command. Thomas is commander of the secretative Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC.

Meanwhile, U.S. forces are waging a cyber offensive to cut or spy on ISIS communications in Mosul. Carter said cyber attacks are being used “to interrupt [and] disrupt ISIL’s command and control, to cause them to lose confidence in their networks, to overload their network so that they can’t function, and do all of these things that will interrupt their ability to command and control forces there, control the population and the economy.”

Carter declined to provide specifics, saying again that success would depend on secrecy. “I’ll be one of the first ones arguing that that’s about all we should talk about. Most importantly, we don’t want the enemy to know when, where, and how we’re conducting cyber operations. We don’t want them to have information that will allow them to adapt over time. We want them to be surprised when we conduct cyber operations,” he said.

U.S. officials do not want ISIS to be able to tell, for example, whether service disruptions are being caused by American cyber attacks or merely reflect the vagaries of everyday Internet usage.

The runup to the Mosul fight has included the seizure of the Syrian town of al-Shadadi, which helped to cut off the Iraqi city from Raqqa, Obama’s counter-ISIS chief at the State Department, Brett McGurk, said last week. The town was retaken by thousands of fighters, about 60 percent of whom were Kurdish.

“We are focused on eliminating the enemy in Raqqa every single day. We’re doing airstrikes there constantly,” McGurk said. “We know more now than we ever did before, and we’re beginning to constrict [the coalition’s] hold on Raqqa.”

Carter called Shadadi “a critical node for ISIL training and logistics, as well as for its oil enterprise. As our partners take control of Shadadi, I believe we will learn a great deal more about ISIL’s criminal networks, its criminal enterprise, and what it does to sustain them.”

McGurk said the Mosul push will be guided from a new joint operations center in Makhmur, southwest of the Kurdish capital of Irbil. The coalition also has forces in Sinjar, Hit, and al-Assad Air Base to the south, a key special operations launching point which has remained under U.S. and Iraqi control.

“Because of our strategy and our determination to accelerate our campaign, momentum is now on our side and not on ISIL’s,” Carter said.

Back in the United States, the ISIS war has all but vanished from media coverage in the runup to the Super Tuesday presidential primaries. In an attempt on Thursday to get some good news into the news, Obama said, “ISIL fighters are learning that they’ve got no safe haven. We can hit them anywhere, anytime — and we do. In fact, ISIL still has not had a single successful major offensive operation in Syria or Iraq since last summer. And we continue to go after ISIL leaders and commanders — taking them out, day in, day out, one after another after another.”

Fresh troops from the 82nd Airborne Division already are rotating into Iraq, Carter said.

http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2016/ ... un/126304/

[Anthea]

The US is urging Americans to leave Iraq before Mosul dam collapses

The United States warned its citizens to be ready to leave Iraq in the event of what it has said could be a catastrophic collapse of the country's largest hydro-electric dam near Mosul.

Iraqi officials have sought to play down the risk but Washington urged its citizens to make contingency plans now.

A U.S. security message cited estimates that Mosul, which is northern Iraq's largest city and under control of Islamic State insurgents, could be inundated by as much as 70 feet (21 meters) of water within hours of the breach.

Cities downstream on the Tigris River such as Tikrit, Samarra and the Iraqi capital Baghdad could be inundated with smaller, but still significant levels within 24-72 hours.

"We have no specific information that indicates when a breach might occur, but out of an abundance of caution, we would like to underscore that prompt evacuation offers the most effective tool to save lives of the hundreds of thousands of people," the security message said.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Sunday precautions were being taken, but described the likelihood of such a scenario as "extremely small".

Islamic State seized the dam in August 2014, raising fears they might blow it up and unleash a wall of water on Mosul and Baghdad that could kill hundreds of thousands.

The dam was recaptured two weeks later by Iraqi government forces backed by air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition, but the disruption of maintenance operations has increased the likelihood of a breach.

An Italian company has been awarded a contract to make urgent repairs to the dam, which has suffered from structural flaws since its construction in the 1980s and requires constant grouting to maintain structural integrity.

Iraq's minister of water resources said earlier this month there was only a "one in a thousand" chance the dam would collapse, and that the solution was to build a new dam or install a deep concrete support wall.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/us-warns- ... ?r=US&IR=T

[Anthea]

Rudaw

Officials argue main task of Mosul liberation be given to local population

A lawmaker in the Iraqi parliament has revealed to Rudaw details of ongoing preparations for a military offensive against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Mosul, saying that a force of 40,000 strong will be needed.

Iraqi Kurdish MP Shakhawan Abdullah, who is also a member of the parliamentary security committee, said that the Peshmerga forces will participate in the offensive in a limited role.

It will be mainly done by the Iraqi army, Sunni Hashd al-Watani and possibly Shiite militia.

Abdullah echoed the belief of some experts that any Shiite participation as militia groups will make the offensive and liberation of Mosul complicated.

“Residents of Mosul worry about participation of Hashd-al Shaabi (Shiite militia), which are planned to be excluded from the operation, yet Abadi’s speech on the matter worried them.” Abdullah told Rudaw.

He referred to a recent speech by Iraqi PM Haider Abadi who said the Shiite militia will take part in driving ISIS out of Mosul.

“The battle of Mosul will not succeed without reaching a consensus among all parties and sects in Iraq,” Abdullah said.

The Iraqi government had allocated part of this year’s budget to recruit 20,000 tribal forces most of which, according to Abdullah has gone to recruiting Shiite militia.“In short, Abadi fears arming the Sunnis,”

Brigadier Firas, spokesman to the Mosul operations command told Rudaw that a big number of fighters also from local Sunni tribes have been trained for Mosul. “Men from tribes of Sabawi, Leheb, and Jibour have applied and been trained to take their city back from Daesh [ISIS] terrorists.”

Ismat Rajab, a Kurdish official in charge of Mosul affairs believes that the main task falls on the Mosul population and their participation is more essential.

“Participation of Mosul residents and Arab tribes are very important. The Americans decided to arm 15,000 men from local Arab tribes and Hashd al-Watani (a Sunni armed group) under the leadership of Atheel al-Nujaifi,” said Rajab. “The battle will not be succeeding without Arab Sunni fighters participating in it.”

The local tribes, he believes, have a great role in the coming fight.

“Even those (Sunni tribes) who were forced to pledge allegiance to Daesh are now tired of their rule and pissed off,” said Rajab.

http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/010320161

[Anthea]

BAS News

US and Iraqi Envoys Discuss Mosul Dam at UN

The dam could still fail, US Ambassador to UN says

The Iraqi and US envoys held a meeting with the UN officials on Wednesday to discuss a “catastrophe” which the possible collapse of the Mosul Dam may bring to Iraq.

Since the hydro-electric dam of Mosul, in Northern Iraq, is allegedly sustaining serious flaws, US has several times warned the Iraqi central government over a possible collapse of the facility, saying that it may cause a humanitarian disaster in the country.

US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, the Iraqi Ambassador Mohamed Ali al-Hakim, experts from the US Army Corps of Engineers, officials from the UN Development Program and Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and other senior diplomats met on March 9th to discuss the issue, Reuters reports.

Power urged all the UN member seats to be prepared to help prevent what would be "a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions.”

She said in a statement later that the briefings given in the meeting were chilling. “While important steps have been taken to address a potential breach, but the dam could still fail,” she added.

Approximately 500,000 to 1.47 million Iraqis live in the flood path, reads the statement.

The Iraqi government has recently signed a contract with an Italian company, worthing $296 million, to maintain the dam for 18 months.

Italy is also planning to send 450 troops to protect the site and the Italian technicians while repairing the facility.

Mosul dam was constructed in 1980s and it is located in the north of Iraq, close to the territories held by the Islamic State (IS) but still under the control of the Kurdish Peshmerga forces.

http://www.basnews.com/index.php/en/news/iraq/263545

[Anthea]

The Mousel dam breach - dummy modelling results

phpBB [video]

Flood propagation through Mousel, Iraq in case of the upstream dam breach.

The first hour of the model run was used to initialise the water level within the dam. The breach occurs after 1 hour, hence the actual flood travel time, is the timing shown in the bottom left minus one hour.

Results are animated in QGIS, using Crayfish plugin.

[Anthea]

Reuters

Obama intervened over crumbling Iraqi dam as U.S. concern grew
By Warren Strobel, Jonathan Landay and Phil Stewart

WASHINGTON On Jan. 21, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Iraq's prime minister in Davos, Switzerland, and handed him a personal note from President Barack Obama pleading for urgent action.

Obama's confidential message to Haider al-Abadi, which was confirmed to Reuters by two U.S. officials and has not been previously reported, was not about Islamic State or Iraq's sectarian divide. It was about a potential catastrophe posed by the dire state of the country's largest dam, whose collapse could unleash a flood killing tens of thousands of people and trigger an environmental disaster.

The president's personal intervention indicates how the fragile Mosul Dam has moved to the forefront of U.S. concerns over Iraq, reflecting fears its failure would also undermine U.S. efforts to stabilize Abadi's government and complicate the war against Islamic State.

It also reflected growing frustration. The U.S. government felt Baghdad was failing to take the threat seriously enough, according to interviews with officials at the State Department, Pentagon, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other agencies.

"They dragged their feet on this," said a U.S. official, who like the other sources declined to be identified.

The Iraqi government declined official comment on those assertions and on the Obama letter.

A U.S. government briefing paper released in late February says that the 500,000 to 1.47 million Iraqis living in the highest-risk areas along the Tigris River "probably would not survive" the flood's impact unless they evacuated. Swept hundreds of miles along in the waters would be unexploded ordnance, chemicals, bodies and buildings.

"Governance and rule of law (would be) disrupted by widespread human, material, economic, and environmental losses," says the paper.

U.S. officials would not disclose the precise contents of Obama's letter.

Its impact on Iraq's government could not be confirmed. But 11 days after it was delivered, Iraqi Minister of Water Resources Muhsin al-Shammari's own political party removed him from responsibility over the dam, according to public statements. The water minister has publicly downplayed the threat posed by the dam.

U.S. relations with al-Shammari, an ally of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, had become so bad that when U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Stuart Jones came to meetings, the minister would walk out, said an Iraqi government source briefed on Mosul Dam planning.

A U.S. embassy official in Baghdad confirmed that al-Shammari would not attend meetings with Jones. In one instance, U.S. officials were told that al-Shammari sat in an adjoining room and listened to a meeting via an audio feed. But cooperation with Abadi has been smooth, the official said.

Al-Shammari has not commented publicly on those meetings. He has suggested that predictions about the dam are an excuse to send more foreign troops to the country.

On March 2, Iraq signed a $296 million contract with Italy's Trevi Group (TFI.MI) to reinforce the dam in northern Iraq, which has needed that work since it was built in the early 1980s on veins of water-soluble gypsum. Italy has said it will send 450 troops to help protect the dam.

ALARMING STUDY

Obama's decision to send the note was prompted in part by alarming U.S. intelligence reports and a new U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study that found that the dam is even more unstable than believed, U.S. officials said.

Paul Salem, vice president of the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank, said that if the dam fails, the ensuing chaos and damage could trigger the collapse of U.S. ally Abadi's government and tarnish Obama's international legacy.

Efforts to repair the dam -- which lies about 30 miles (48 km) northwest of the city of Mosul -- have been handicapped by Iraq's chaotic security situation; political divisions in Baghdad; years of previous warnings that did not come true; and a cultural divide, U.S. and Iraqi officials and analysts said.

U.S. officials said Abadi, who is also grappling with the war against Islamic State, political infighting and budget shortfalls caused by low oil prices, is now focused on the dam and overseeing efforts to repair it.

"We've gotten to a point where there's no question (the Iraqis) are on board," said a senior USAID official.

However, Trevi says it will take four months to prepare the work site. And the 2.2 mile (3.5 km)-long hydroelectric dam faces its highest risk between April and June from rising water levels due to melting snow.

Grout to reinforce the dam must be trucked in from Turkey, officials said, because the previous factory is in Mosul, now controlled by Islamic State militants.

"SWISS CHEESE"

Some Iraqi officials said Washington is sounding loud alarms over the dam to absolve itself of responsibility. The United States, which invaded Iraq in 2003, could have sought a more permanent solution before its 2011 pullout of combat troops but merely kept the dam operating at minimum cost, they contend.

There is no sign that a breach of Mosul Dam is imminent.

But the structure was built on what the senior USAID official called "the geologic equivalent of Swiss cheese."

The 45-foot (14-meter) high wall of water that would swamp Mosul city within four hours of a dam breach would be "roughly what hit Japan during the height of the tsunami" in 2011, he said.

Maintenance was suspended after Islamic State seized the dam for two weeks in August 2014, scattering workers and destroying equipment. Work has resumed in recent months but officials have said international expertise is needed to prevent collapse.

While the full U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report hasn't been released, slides summarizing its conclusions and dated Jan. 30, were posted on the Iraqi parliament's website last month.

"All information gathered in the last year indicates Mosul Dam is at a significantly higher risk of failure than originally understood and is at a higher risk of failure today than it was a year ago," says one slide.

A senior Iraqi official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said this U.S. assessment helped drive the decision to finalize the contract with Trevi group after months of talks.

Richard Coffman, a University of Arkansas assistant professor of civil engineering, studied satellite radar imagery and found the dam was sinking by eight millimeters a year.

Resuming grout-pumping operations is only a temporary solution, he said. "There is a need for a long-term fix."

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-midea ... SKCN0WO0DS

[Anthea]

Mosul dam engineers warn it could fail at any time killing 1m people

Iraqis who built dam say structure is increasingly precarious and describe government response as ‘ridiculous’

Iraqi engineers involved in building the Mosul dam 30 years ago have warned that the risk of its imminent collapse and the consequent death toll could be even worse than reported.

They pointed out that pressure on the dam’s compromised structure was building up rapidly as winter snows melted and more water flowed into the reservoir, bringing it up to its maximum capacity, while the sluice gates normally used to relieve that pressure were jammed shut.

The Iraqi engineers also said the failure to replace machinery or assemble a full workforce more than a year after Islamic State temporarily held the dam means that the chasms in the porous rock under the dam were getting bigger and more dangerous every day.

On Wednesday, the Iraqi government announced it had signed a €273m (£210m) contract with an Italian contractor to reinforce and maintain the Mosul dam for 18 months, following talks in New York between the Italian foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, and US and Iraqi officials. Italy has said it plans to send 450 troops to protect the dam site, but it is unclear how long it will take to replace damaged machinery and reassemble the required workforce.

The engineers warned that potential loss of life from a sudden catastrophic collapse of the Mosul dam could be even greater than the 500,000 officially estimated, as they said many people could die in the resulting mass panic, with a 20-metre-high flood wave hitting the city of Mosul and then rolling on down the Tigris valley through Tikrit and Samarra to Baghdad.

One of the Iraqi engineers, now living in Europe, described as “ridiculous” the Iraqi government’s emergency policy of telling local people to move 6km (3.5 miles) from the river banks.

Nasrat Adamo, the dam’s former chief engineer who spent most of his professional career shoring it up in the face of fundamental flaws in its construction, said that the structure would only survive with round-the-clock work with teams filling in holes in the porous bedrock under the structure, a process known as grouting. But that level of maintenance, dating back to just after the dam’s construction in 1984, evaporated after the Isis occupation.

“We used to have 300 people working 24 hours in three shifts but very few of these workers have come back. There are perhaps 30 people there now,” Adamo said in a telephone interview from Sweden, where he works as a consultant.

“The machines for grouting have been looted. There is no cement supply. They can do nothing. It is going from bad to worse, and it is urgent. All we can do is hold our hearts.”

At the same time as the bedrock is getting weaker and more porous, the water pressure on the dam is building as spring meltwater flows into the reservoir behind it. Giant gates that would normally be used to ease the pressure by allowing water to run through are SHUT

Million people along the Tigris at risk from 20-metre-high flash flood if the Mosul dam collapses

Residents of Mosul have been advised to move at least 3.5 miles away from the river

Failing foundations and rising water levels put Mosul dam in danger of collapse

“One of them is jammed, and when one of them is closed the other one has to be closed. They must work together,” Adamo said. “Otherwise, you get asymmetric flow and that speeds up the erosion.”

Nadhir al-Ansari, another Iraqi engineer from when the dam was built, also voiced concern about the rising waters in the reservoir.

“The fact that the bottom outlets are jammed is the thing that really worries us,” said Ansari, now an engineering professor at the Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. “In April and May, there will be a lot more snow melting and it will bring plenty of water into the reservoir. The water level is now 308 metres but it will go up to over 330 metres. And the dam is not as before. The caverns underneath have increased. I don’t think the dam will withstand that pressure.

“If the dam fails, the water will arrive in Mosul in four hours. It will arrive in Baghdad in 45 hours. Some people say there could be half a million people killed, some say a million. I imagine it will be more in the absence of a good evacuation plan.”

He said the government policy response, calling on the local population to move at least 6km from the river Tigris, was “ridiculous”. The US embassy in Baghdad has urged American citizens to leave the area.

“What are all these people, millions of people, supposed to do when they get 6km away? There is no support for them there. Nothing to help them live.”

The Mosul dam was first conceived in the 1950s, but its construction was postponed because of the problematic geology of that section of the Tigris, where much of the bedrock is water-soluble. It was finally built by Saddam Hussein’s regime and seen at the time as a prestige project. At the time, Ansari was a scientific consultant at the irrigation ministry.

“I went to visit the site and saw what kind of stone there was there. A lot of gypsum and anhydrite, which are very soluble. I was really concerned; I told the director general. He said: ‘Don’t worry. This is all being taken care of.’”

In the preceding years, successive foreign consultants had pointed out the weaknesses in the rock formations but all assured the Iraqi government the problem could be solved by grouting. The decision to go ahead was pushed through by one of the regime’s vice-presidents, Taha Yassin Ramadan.

“Ramadan was very keen to have the dam,” Ansari said. “He wanted to show Saddam he was doing something brilliant, and he came from Mosul, so he wanted to do something that brought jobs to Mosul. This sped up the decision.”

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. From then on it required constant maintenance to fill the caverns being hollowed out by water running through the soluble bedrock. A total of 95,000 tonnes of grout of different types were used over the dam’s lifetime.

“All you are doing with grouting is prolonging the life of the dam. 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.

An international conference has been announced in Rome in April to discuss ways of preventing a disaster, but by then it could already be too late.

Nobody knows when it will fail it could be a year from now or It could be tomorrow

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ ... -1m-people