The Danger of Mass Engineering Projects

Here’s an interesting story. The Guardian is reporting that lack of maintenance and the dangers of the vicinity of the Mosul dam of the Tigris could result in catastrophic failure:

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.

The Iraqi government has contracted the necessary repairs to an Italian company (words fail me) and the Italian government has committed to sending several hundred troops to protect them. That strikes me as ill-considered.

How bad could a catastrophic failure of the dam be? This bad:

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.

This story highlights just how dangerous mass engineering projects—like the Mosul dam—can be in the developing world. They don’t have the political stability, the social stability, or the infrastructure necessary to maintain them. Smaller projects are smarter but don’t have the prestige value and it’s all about prestige, isn’t it?

We can barely keep the Boulder Dam in repair and yet the Iraqis expected to keep the Mosul dam in repair? The Mosul dam is almost ten times as long as Boulder.