The
Cracks In Saddam's Dam
By Patrick Cockburn
12 August,2007
Counterpunch
As
world attention focuses on the daily slaughter in Iraq, a devastating
disaster is impending in the north of the country, where the wall of
a dam holding back the Tigris river north of Mosul city is in danger
of imminent collapse.
"It could go at any
minute," says a senior aid worker who has knowledge of the struggle
by US and Iraqi engineers to save the dam. "The potential for disaster
is very great."
If the dam does fail, a wall
of water will sweep into Mosul, Iraq's third largest city with a population
of 1.7 million, 20 miles to the south. Experts say the flood waters
could destroy 70 per cent of Mosul and inflict heavy damage 190 miles
downstream along the Tigris.
The dam was built between
1980 and 1984 and has long been known to be in a dangerous condition
because of unstable bedrock. "The dam was constructed on a foundation
of marls, soluble gypsum, anhydrite, and karstic limestone that are
continuously dissolving," said specialists at the US embassy in
a statement. "The dissolution creates an increased risk for dam
failure."
In fact the state of the
two-mile long earthfill dam, which holds back some eight billion cubic
meters of water in Iraq's largest reservoir, has recently been deteriorating
at ever-increasing speed. According to one source, the chance of a total
and immediate failure of the dam is now believed to be "reasonably
high" at current water levels and "most certain" within
the next few years.
The effort to prevent the
collapse of the dam is overseen by the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources.
The US Army Corps of Engineers has made continual efforts to monitor
the deterioration and undertake remedial action. But a US report, obtained
separately from the embassy statement, says that "due to fundamental
and irreversible flaws existing in the dam's foundation, the US Army
Corps of Engineers believes that the safety of the Mosul Dam against
a potential catastrophic failure cannot be guaranteed".
Iraq, the site of the biblical
flood, is very vulnerable to inundation because it is very flat south
of the Kurdish mountains. Prior to the building of dykes and other control
measures in the early 20th century, there were frequent disastrous floods
when snow melted in the mountains of Turkey.
The great majority of Iraqis
live along the Tigris and Euphrates. If the dam does break, specialist
sources say that the impact of the flood would be felt all along the
Tigris river valley. This would mean heavy damage to cities such as
Tikrit and Samarra and the floods could reach as far as Baghdad, home
to six million people, though by then the force of the floodwaters should
have dissipated.
Given that the Iraqi government
has only intermittent control of this area north of the capital, which
is overwhelmingly Sunni, it is unlikely it could undertake effective
measures to save lives if a flood occurred.
The main method used to strengthen
the foundations of the Mosul dam is pumping liquid cement into it or
grouting. But a US-funded study concluded that grouting would not save
the dam although it did need to be continued and enhanced "to reduce
the probability of failure".
An international panel of
experts called in by the Ministry of Water Resources in Baghdad concluded
that a limit should also be placed on the level of the water in the
reservoir - that was done in April last year.
The ministry did not respond
to inquiries by email and phone about the deteriorating state of the
dam. "It is a time bomb waiting to go off," said the aid worker.
"Everybody knows about
the threat but they have other preoccupations and, in the case of foreigners,
it is now conveniently in Iraqi hands." He said that on some US
communications equipment, there was a panic button to be pressed as
soon as the dam began to give way. The unstable bedrock beneath the
dam has been known about for a long time.
The Iraqi government has
been trying to patch it up for 19 years. It is not clear why the dam,
known as the "Saddam Dam" prior to 2003, was built where it
is, given the solubility of the rock underneath it. The fact that construction
began in 1980, the first year of the Iran-Iraq war, and the reservoir
began to fill only four years later, may explain why such a gross error
about its site was made.
Saddam Hussein began a period
of helter-skelter construction in the first years of the Iran-Iraq war
to show his people the conflict would not hold back economic development.
The construction boom, funded by loans from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and
the UAE, involved too many new projects for Iraq to monitor effectively.
The dam has an installed hydroelectric capacity to produce 750MW of
electricity and its other functions are flood control, the supply of
water for irrigation and municipal water supply. Given the chronic shortage
of electricity in Iraq there is a disinclination to reduce the amount
coming from the Mosul dam or any other source.
The weakness of the dam became
evident soon after it was built. The US embassy statement says: "To
manage the risk, the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources has been conducting
continuous grouting operations to fill voids and fractures created by
the dissolution of the foundation since the 1980s."
None of the measures have
proved to be enough so far, although the US government is worried enough
to provide construction materials, equipment and spare parts. The UN's
Food and Agriculture Organization has also provided equipment for grouting
over the past year.
If the dam breaks it will
be deeply damaging to the Iraqi government and the US authorities in
Iraq because the disasters of the past four years are already seen by
Iraqis as evidence of their inability to rule Iraq effectively.
Patrick Cockburn
is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in
Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for best
non-fiction book of 2006.
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