Mosul Tov

    Okay, a terrible pun and a variant of the original phrase "masel tov" which from Biblical Hebrew meant what is thought to be "constellation" or "destiny," says Wikipedia.  But for the residents of the city of Mosul and other cities that are downriver on the Tigris masel tov might come to mean more of a disaster instead of the more traditional meaning associated with it, that of congratulations and good luck.  Picture this, a wave of water nearly 100 feet high and with enough force and volume to wipe out cities and drown hundreds of thousands of people.  It's a scenario typically imagined with tidal waves or as disasters depicted onscreen in movies such as The Impossible and 2012.  For the residents of Mosul and cities such as Tikrit, Samarrah, and Baghdad, such a scene might become a reality as soon as the spring of this year...the Mosul Dam 60 km above them is struggling to stay intact.  The Iraqi government has already issued a warning for residents to move at least 5 km away from the dam but it may not be enough.  Here's what an article in the New Yorker had to say about what might happen should the foundation underneath the dam give way: In the language of hydraulic engineering, the process eroding the foundation is known as “solutioning.”  If that problem is not addressed, what happens next is “piping”: water begins to travel between the voids, moving horizontally beneath the dam...“Once piping begins, there is no going back.  In twelve hours, the dam is gone.”...If the dam ruptured, it would likely cause a catastrophe of Biblical proportions, loosing a wave as high as a hundred feet that would roll down the Tigris, swallowing everything in its path for more than a hundred miles.  Large parts of Mosul would be submerged in less than three hours.  Along the riverbanks, towns and cities containing the heart of Iraq’s population would be flooded; in four days, a wave as high as sixteen feet would crash into Baghdad, a city of six million people.  “If there is a breach in the dam, there will be no warning,” Alwash said.  “It’s a nuclear bomb with an unpredictable fuse.”  Azzam Alwash is an Iraqi-American civil engineer who has served as an adviser on the dam.

Map image from Encyclopaedia Britannica

  
    In the map you can see the city of Mosul just above the center point (and who knew Iraq and Turkey had so many bodies of fresh water?)  From the view of the map, the lake behind the Mosul Dam doesn't look quite so threatening as it rests just north of the city; but it's the 4th largest dam in the Middle East. Added the article: When the Americans invaded in 2003, they discovered a country shattered by sanctions.  Power plants flickered, irrigation canals were clogged, bridges and roads were crumbling; much of the infrastructure, it seemed, had been improvised.  The U.S. government poured billions of dollars into rebuilding it, and in 2006 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began several assessments of the Mosul Dam.  The first report was dire, predicting “mass civilian fatalities” if it failed.  “In terms of internal erosion potential of the foundation, Mosul Dam is the most dangerous dam in the world,” it said...the United Nations released its own warning, predicting that “hundreds of thousands of people could be killed” if the dam failed.   And there's this from Aljazeera: An in-depth study by the European Commission's Science Centre, released last April, puts the number of Iraqis that could be affected by the dam's floodwater after its collapse at seven million.   The 58-page report by the Joint Research Centre simulates different scenarios that may result from the dam's breakdown.  If just 26 percent of the dam collapses, the study predicts a flood of catastrophic proportions.  "This simulation…results in a very high wave of water, [up to 25 metres high]...arriving at Mosul after [100 minutes].  The capital Baghdad is reached after 3.5 days with a maximum water height of 8 metres and a mean of around 2 metres."  Floodwater will destroy the infrastructure of all the cities along the Tigris banks, including Tikrit, until the water eventually stops 700km south of the dam.

   There have been other cases where dams have been predicted to fail and the warnings left unheeded.  A similar version of the results was tightly captured in the Norwegian film The Wave about the tsunami caused by a large rockfall, something that actually happened in the area in both 1905 and 1934...evacuation warning systems for a possible future occurrence are in place, at least in this tourist-traveled town in Norway.  For Iraq's dam above Mosul, the only "warning" system would be the 500 Kurdish soldiers standing ready to again defend of the dam after the recent and long fight to gain control of it back from ISIS, who kept the dam intact because it could control the electricity it provided and gain the money from such. 

    As mentioned in an earlier post, the Mosul Dam is but one of nearly 850,000 dams in the world (an quick animation of the world's craze to build dams can be seen here).  The problem with the Mosul Dam is what it is built upon...gypsum (which erodes with water).  As the gypsum dissolves, the support underneath grows weaker much as a sinkhole would happen; so the workers at the dam continuously pump fillers into the gaps...continued the piece in the New Yorker: To control the erosion, the government began a crash program of filling the voids with cement, a process called “grouting.”...The work of maintaining the dam is performed in the “gallery,” a tunnel that runs inside the base, four hundred feet below the top...Inside the gallery, the engineers are engaged in what amounts to an endless struggle against nature.  Using antiquated pumps as large as truck engines, they drive enormous quantities of liquid cement into the earth.  Since the dam opened, in 1984, engineers working in the gallery have pumped close to a hundred thousand tons of grout—an average of ten tons a day—into the voids below.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has sensors which monitor the pressure on the dam walls 24/7; and some Iraqi officials feel that the predictions of the dam's wall collapsing are vastly exaggerated.  One diversion gate at the dam --meant to release water in a hurry-- was stuck closed when the author visited the site (Italian engineers have now been contracted to return to the site in an attempt to fix many of the problems).  Added reporting from The New Arab: ...excluding the previous three months of emergency repair, there has not been any continuous maintenance on the dam in almost two years.  The dam’s structural problems lie in its initial foundations.  The dam was built on gypsum, a soft mineral which dissolves in water.  As such, the dam’s foundations are facing constant erosion from the matter it is trying to contain, no matter how much grouting is done.  Without continuous maintenance, this  gypsum foundation disintegrates and the dam is allowed to sink in its middle, causing cracks in the wall and eventual disaster.

   One science fiction novel featured an alien invasion of our planet with their first targets being the taking out of our dams, a scenario that caused not only a massive loss of life but tied up a huge section of our response population...the rest, for them (at least in the novel) was easy.  We obviously depend on dams, not only for controlling the ebb and flow of rivers to prevent both drought and flood, but also for the hydroelectric power they provide.  And the truth is that while we can view these massive structures as immovable and solid, in many cases nature seems to often have a surprise or two up her sleeve.  In the case of the Mosul Dam, the $300 million contract being paid to the Italian firm might prove to be an inexpensive fix in the long run...but it might still prove to be a temporary one.  Spring is just around the corner, fingers crossed...