This is Mosul, Iraq: it’s Iraq’s second-ranked city by population, and first-ranked city
by which city sounds the most like T-Mobile.
And this is the Mosul Dam.
Right now, it provides hydroelectric power and flood control for the city below, but
over the last few decades, analysts have been considering what would happen if it stopped
doing either of those things and instead catastrophically failed and flooded the entire region.
Believe it or not, it turns out a catastrophic failure would be quite bad: in fact, the damage
would be greater than a nuclear bomb.
Oh, and even worse, the dam experts are pretty damn sure it’s gonna happen.
And oh again, even worse than that, the government refuses to listen to a damn thing the experts
have to say.
But how did this happen?
Well, thanks to a whole bunch of -isms.
Authoritarianism, for one, and good ole American interventionism, for another.
The thing is, in a country with sand-heavy, low-lying foundations, there’s really no
good place to build something that needs a solid foundation to work—like making a Marvel
film without a Chris.
Ultimately, Saddam Hussein—Iraq’s president at the time, who was almost as bad at dam
location selection as he was at not getting executed—went ahead with a location due
north of the city of Mosul on the Tigris River, as a dam there could ensure Iraq had the lion’s
share of water from the Tigris —which would offset how much water Iraq’s farmers had
lost from Turkey, who had just built a bunch of dams along the Euphrates upstream, cutting
off all the Iraqi farmers downstream, who had relied on it for thousands of years.
So, building their own dam on the Tigris would accomplish several goals, as it would create
a consistent water supply, balance out the river’s annual flood and drought cycles,
and most importantly, flip the bird to Turkey.
As it turns out, building a gigantic dam in the middle of the desert is pretty damn hard,
requiring billions of dollars, military intervention, and, most importantly, blind ignorance.
Engineers warned Hussein that the Mosul region didn’t feature any nice, solid rock to build
a dam, and the most prevalent mineral layer was gypsum—a type of mineral that, ironically
enough, dissolves in water.
Building a dam in gypsum is kind of like planting your cantaloupe tree outside the house of
Johnny the Cantaloupe Smasher.
They warned it would take extensive grouting, or filling in the riverbanks with a less-permeable
rock, and lining the entire reservoir basin with more solid rock, to build the dam.
But not to be deterred by things like “science” and “facts” and “catastrophic danger,”
Hussein ordered the dam’s construction in 1981, a year after declaring war on Iran,
which put pressure on its engineers and workers to finish building it, fast.
In the end, only 150 meters, or nearly 500 feet, of cement directly underneath the dam,
and 25 meters, or 82 feet, of cement between the dam and the gypsum layers, was put in,
despite the concerns of Hochtief Aktiengesellschaft, the seemingly intentionally hard to pronounce
German-Italian company hired to build the dam.
Though the engineers had warned of the dangers inherent to building a dam there for decades
previously, they didn’t predict how bad, and how quickly, there would be dam problems.
Mere months after completion, small cesspools began to accumulate on riverbanks downstream
and sinkholes threatened the dam’s structural integrity.
The dam’s gypsum foundation resulted in increased “seepage”, which meant water
continually leaked through it, which I should point out, is the exact opposite of a dam’s
whole point.
With eleven billion cubic meters, or forty trillion cubic feet of water being held back,
having a soluble rock layer becomes less of an occupational hazard and more of an apocalyptic
event waiting to happen.
The government did order more grouting of the dam to pour cement and make the dam less
likely to crack, but continues to deflect responsibility for building it, instead taking
a page right out of the American playbook and blaming everyone else.
Although a dam downriver near the town of Badush was partially constructed to help mitigate
a flood from Mosul Dam, Hussein had to use its construction materials after invading
Kuwait, and a few years later, the United States decided to simplify things for everyone
by bombing that dam into oblivion.
But, of course, there’s a totally awesome and sustainable and not terrifying way they’re
keeping the dam going: a crew of maintenance workers who pour liquid cement into the dam
24/7, 365 days a year, to keep the rock from washing away—seriously.
As you can see in this simulation made by The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency,
seemingly rendered with a heavily modded version of Sims 6: if, or more accurately, when the
dam breaks, the city of Mosul could be underwater in three to four hours, creating 100 foot—or
30 meter—waves that would wipe out anything in its path for over 100 miles, or 160 kilometers.
Since most of Iraq’s cities are along the Tigris, it would impact most of the country’s
population, and in less than a week, would eventually reach the country’s largest city,
Baghdad.
Since its cities would be underwater, Iraq couldn’t mobilize medical or emergency services
anywhere.
There’s no telling how many people could die, though conservative estimates range from
the low millions to the tens of millions.
Despite harsh warning from the US Army Corps of Engineers and the United Nations, Iraq
has done little to prevent a national disaster, with officials declaring as recently as 2015
that the dam is fine, there’s nothing wrong with it, and actually, the rest of the world
needs to stop harshing their mellow vibe.
The good news is, there are several solutions to help prevent Mosul Dam’s collapse.
The bad news is, they either require spending billions of dollars or being nice to Turkey—two
things that Iraq isn’t very keen on.
Iraq could design a better retaining dam to prevent any more seepage, which would cost
billions; or it could drain the dam and instead partner with Turkey to build a larger dam
in the Taurus Mountain—located far away from any population centers.
Unfortunately, most of Iraq’s populace distrusts diplomacy and doesn’t want the government
to spend billions to fix a problem that many think is an American-bred conspiracy, a dangerous
train of thought that could persist until the dam actually breaks.
But surely something will be done: I mean, when has humanity ever put off preventing
a potentially catastrophic disaster until it was too late?
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