By Patrick Cockburn in Arbil, Iraq
"A catastrophic failure of the largest dam in Iraq would send a wave 65ft high hurtling down the valley of the river Tigris, killing up to 500,000 people, US engineers warned yesterday.
The dam, which is near Mosul in the north of the country, was built in 1984 on a bed of water-soluble rock and is in imminent danger of collapse. "In terms of the internal erosion potential of the foundation, Mosul Dam is the most dangerous dam in the world," said a report by the US Army Corps of Engineers. "If a small problem [at] Mosul dam occurs, failure is likely." The collapse of the two-mile long, earth-filled dam would release eight billion cubic metres of water in the lake behind it in a giant wave which would flood Mosul – a city of 1.7 million people 20 miles downstream – to a depth of 60ft.
"A catastrophic failure of the Mosul Dam would result in flooding along the Tigris river all the way to Baghdad," the US military commander General David Petraeus and the US ambassador Ryan Crocker warned the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, in a letter on 3 May this year......
The state of the dam and the experts' belief that it is on the verge of collapse was first revealed by The Independent on 8 August. "It could go at any minute," a senior aid worker, who knew of the struggle by American and Iraqi engineers to save the dam, told this newspaper. "The potential for disaster is very great.".....
The flat, Mesopotamian plain was the site of the biblical flood where Noah launched his ark to escape the rising waters. Much of the story was drawn from the legend of Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian hero, which recounts the tale of a great inundation with details strikingly similar to those in Genesis......."
No comments:
Post a Comment