The collapse of the Mosul dam may be imminent.

[Simon_Jester]

Er, excuse me, maddoc...

If that was a response to ME, I apologize, but I honestly did not have time to read a seventeen-page paper in the time between your post and mine. I did read a portion of the paper, and mentally filed it as "describes extent of flood in a hypothetical scenario," and assumed it was NOT necessarily connected to the "million dead" estimate. Especially since you didn't say that the report you linked to was the origin of the "million dead" estimate. Without doing a careful read of a seventeen page scientific paper, I had no realistic way of being sure that the paper contained the answer to the question I posed.

Linking to solid primary sources is very good. I appreciate you doing it.

However... It is not, for a variety of reasons, a substitute for clearly stating one's own thesis.

Remember all those times when someone linked to an hour long Youtube video and said "this refutes your argument" without specifying which part? Yeah. Same problem.

[madd0ct0r]

Once I'm off my phone I'll copy the relevant line out of the conclusions. But 17pages is nothing and I'd value people's opinions on this a little more if they checked instead of posting to sound clever.

[jwl]

You don't need to walk at a brisk pace for five hours to get out of a city: the only reason I mentioned five hours is because that was the timespan broomstick quoted: 1-2 hours is a more accurate number.

Someone in shape and without significant obstruction or burden can cover 5-8 km in an hour (I base that on personal experience - several times I walked from the Chicago Loop to my home in Rogers Park, which is definitely through an urban area, and usually made the 16 km trip in two hours).

However, if you are walking in a crowd, which is what would occur here, you will move at a slower pace unless you want to start shoving slower people out of your way. Which is not a good idea to do in a crowd under high stress conditions. If you are carrying your worldly possessions/valuables, or a child, you will move slower. If you are pregnant, elderly, or disabled you will move slower.

In addition, most people are not going to be able to walk at that pace more than an hour or two with needing to rest. Clumps of resting people will become an obstacle. Based on historical accounts of mass movements of people, you will also have a certain percentage of people simply drop dead from stress, which will also be an obstacle.

In other words, this will be enormously different that an unobstructed, unburdened stroll through a cityscape.

Yes, some people will be able to get out in that time frame - the highly fit, and possibly the slightly ruthless. That means the survivors will mostly be young men.

Well yes, but you've got longer than 1-2 hours to get out, so there is plenty of leeway. Also in an emergency situation you don't need to be as polite about, say, jumping over walls or going through people's gardens if the crowd gets too thick on the path. Also, looking at the maps madd0ct0r posted, you won't need to go all the way out of the city to escape the floodwater, you only need to go about halfway.

The point I was assuming broomstick was trying to make was that the floodwater itself would drown those still left in the city when the floodwaters reach there. That danger is only going to stay for as long as the floodwaters remain in the city, which means they only need to take supplies for a few days and then they can go back again.

No, they can't.

Why do you think a flood of that sort will leave buildings intact? Honestly, do some some research. A failed-dam flood sweeps away a lot of buildings, bridges, destroys roads, and leaves mud and debris meters deep in its wake. Sure, they can go back to a wrecked city with no power, no clean water, and little to no shelter... but why would they? Other than to see for themselves the level of destruction, at which point they're going to go elsewhere for food, water, and shelter.

Considering that the maps madd0ct0r posted shows most of the floodwater goes to depths of 10-30 metres, good point. But it also shows that half the city gets no flooding at all, so they could just get resources from there instead. They may not even need to take and resources with them, although that would probably be recommended.

Even if they don't have supplies to last that long, people can go a few days without food and still survive. Also remember that these people are Muslims: they are used to fasting because of Ramadan.

Ramadan doesn't mean going days without food, it means going without food during daylight. That's a big difference.

Well yeah, but it does give them a certain degree more practice at doing without than the average westerner.

Do you really think people are going to get lost in a city they have lived all their lives?

Yes.

Happens all the time without a natural disaster occurring. After the flood, there may be much of the city unrecognizable.

But the evacuation happens before the flood, not after the flood.

[Broomstick]

Well yes, but you've got longer than 1-2 hours to get out, so there is plenty of leeway.

That's assuming there will be a timely warning. You'll have parents needing to gather up children who won't see the necessity of acting rapidly. The old and disabled, the injured and sick...

Again, look at New Orleans. They had TWO DAYS to evacuate the city and tens of thousands were still left in harm's way. What makes you think Mosul could do even as well as that in 3-5 hours?

Also in an emergency situation you don't need to be as polite about, say, jumping over walls or going through people's gardens if the crowd gets too thick on the path.

You're still thinking like a fit, young man. Maybe YOU could climb/jump walls but a lot of other people can't. I might be able to do that, but my spouse absolutely can not, as just one example. Most people are not going to be able to parkour around obstacles.

Considering that the maps madd0ct0r posted shows most of the floodwater goes to depths of 10-30 metres, good point. But it also shows that half the city gets no flooding at all, so they could just get resources from there instead. They may not even need to take and resources with them, although that would probably be recommended.

Power will probably be out to the entire city - isn't the dam where they get their electricity?

Also, helping yourself to "resources" after a disaster is usually considered "looting". It typically goes along with anarchy and lawlessness.

Even if they don't have supplies to last that long, people can go a few days without food and still survive. Also remember that these people are Muslims: they are used to fasting because of Ramadan.

Ramadan doesn't mean going days without food, it means going without food during daylight. That's a big difference.

Well yeah, but it does give them a certain degree more practice at doing without than the average westerner.

yes and no.

There's an enormous psychological difference between voluntarily going without food knowing there will be a meal at the end of the day and not knowing where your next meal is coming from.

There are also large categories of people exempted from Ramadan fasting, such as children and the ill. Natural disasters, however, do not provide exemptions for those for whom fasting is a very high risk activity.

Do you really think people are going to get lost in a city they have lived all their lives?

Yes.

Happens all the time without a natural disaster occurring. After the flood, there may be much of the city unrecognizable.

But the evacuation happens before the flood, not after the flood.

Doesn't matter - people can and do get lost all the time in cities, even cities they have lived for decades. Add in stress and it gets worse. Yes, you'll have people getting lost.

After the flood it just gets worse.

[madd0ct0r]

Regarding the population death stats:

http://www.iwtc.info/2009_pdf/4-1.pdf

and this table:



that's 100 thousand, not one million. It's also ten hospitals, 5 water treatment plants and 2 power plants and the associated lines. just below the table is also noted this.

The main findings demonstrate that an area of 252 km2 along Tigris River between dam site and Mosul city which was classified as very good agricultural lands and was utilized by the villagers there will be flooded due to Mosul dam failure in the worst failure scenario, the maximum flood depth at Mosul city will be 25 meter and the flood elevation will be 235.2 meter above see level and the maximum flood discharge will be (207632) m3/sec with an average flow velocity 3.5 m/sec. The flood wave will cover about 54% of the Mosul city in which the areas of the eastern bank of the city
will be subjected to flood slightly more than the western bank.

That's 252km2 of farmland scoured out or buried. This wave isn't going to be clean water, it's going to dig the upper reaches of the river back to bedrock and dump the sand and mud as it loses energy, especially flowing over a rough surface like a city.
Plus the stuff downstream of the city which will have all the oils, shit and pollutants mixed in.


TLDR: 100,000 in the wave. the rest will follow in the aftermath.

[Patroklos]

I did read the whole thing (it's mostly graphs and tables and pictures) and nowhere does it mention deaths or a destructive tsunami wave of doom. As the table quoted above is titled it talks about inundation. In that light I take that to mean 100,000 people will be in the flooded zone, not 100,000 people will die. Some of those will die I am sure, but the paper doesn't say silent on that.

[jwl]

Well yes, but you've got longer than 1-2 hours to get out, so there is plenty of leeway.

That's assuming there will be a timely warning. You'll have parents needing to gather up children who won't see the necessity of acting rapidly. The old and disabled, the injured and sick...

Again, look at New Orleans. They had TWO DAYS to evacuate the city and tens of thousands were still left in harm's way. What makes you think Mosul could do even as well as that in 3-5 hours?

I don't know why it took so long to evacuate everyone from New Orleans. Maybe they didn't take the storm as seriously as they could have done? If I remember correctly they were caught unprepared because they were expecting to see the flood defences hold up against a storm surge but the river burst its banks instead and went around the flood defences.

Also in an emergency situation you don't need to be as polite about, say, jumping over walls or going through people's gardens if the crowd gets too thick on the path.

You're still thinking like a fit, young man. Maybe YOU could climb/jump walls but a lot of other people can't. I might be able to do that, but my spouse absolutely can not, as just one example. Most people are not going to be able to parkour around obstacles.

I'm not taking about scaling huge walls, just going over small walls and walking off the paths a bit. Look at the picture Patroklos gave of Mosul a page back. There's lots of wide open spaces away from the main paths people could go through if the main paths get too crowded.

In the (admittedly unlikely right now) event of a coordinated evacuation response, it would make sense to close the roads apart from the elderly or disabled or people taking them, so they could get out via car whilst everyone else walks.

Also, helping yourself to "resources" after a disaster is usually considered "looting". It typically goes along with anarchy and lawlessness.

I'm talking about buying resources when they get there. It's not going to be difficult for people to take a wallet with them. But let's say looting does happen. It's still not going to be the end of the world. Going back to your New Orleans example, looting happened there and the vast majority of the people who went through that storm are still alive.

[Sea Skimmer]

overall death caused all along the Tigris by large scale flooding and humanitarian crises that the Iraqi government itself will probably fail to resolve very well.

Overall deaths. 500,000 to 1.5 million depending on variables.

[Simon_Jester]

Once I'm off my phone I'll copy the relevant line out of the conclusions. But 17pages is nothing and I'd value people's opinions on this a little more if they checked instead of posting to sound clever.

Had I known the source you linked answered the question I posed, as opposed to being an answer to a different question, I would have made the time to read it.

But I did not know that, and you did not tell me, and you originally posted the article in answer to a different but related question.

I regularly read documents this long or longer, but I often postpone reading them if I am reading them purely "on spec."

Well yes, but you've got longer than 1-2 hours to get out, so there is plenty of leeway. Also in an emergency situation you don't need to be as polite about, say, jumping over walls or going through people's gardens if the crowd gets too thick on the path. Also, looking at the maps madd0ct0r posted, you won't need to go all the way out of the city to escape the floodwater, you only need to go about halfway.

And every time you have to jump over a wall, the guy in a wheelchair just says "you know what, fuck it, leave me here to die," right? So does grandma. So does the eight year old child who just can't make it any farther because they're tired.

Unless you evacuate the city weeks in advance, a lot of people are going to be left behind. An "every man for himself" evacuation on foot is risky and lots of people die in it. This is just a reality, anyone who has experienced or studied major disasters can tell you as much.

And if you did evacuate the city weeks in advance... well, where are you going to house and feed them during those weeks or months? This question would arise anyway if the flood actually happened, but now it arises sooner, possibly months before the disaster actually happens.

Considering that the maps madd0ct0r posted shows most of the floodwater goes to depths of 10-30 metres, good point. But it also shows that half the city gets no flooding at all, so they could just get resources from there instead. They may not even need to take and resources with them, although that would probably be recommended.

Any time hundreds or thousands of people are displaced, it takes massive aid shipments to keep them alive. It doesn't matter where they are, this still happens.

Because local transportation infrastructure is snarled (oh, your store gets its products from a distribution center on the other side of the river? Guess your shelves will be empty!). Because (ideally) government and humanitarian agencies are all over the place, which is helpful but causes dislocation of normal economic operations.

Because the refugees often have little or no money to pay for anything. Because they often don't have immediate local knowledge of the areas they shelter in. Because opportunistic looters or criminals are preying on everyone and creating chaos.

Even if they don't have supplies to last that long, people can go a few days without food and still survive. Also remember that these people are Muslims: they are used to fasting because of Ramadan.

Ramadan doesn't mean going days without food, it means going without food during daylight. That's a big difference.

Well yeah, but it does give them a certain degree more practice at doing without than the average westerner.

I cannot imagine you seriously thinking this matters for people who haven't eaten in days. Or for people who are forced to perform significant heavy exercise and labor or die while not eating; Ramadan is not normally a time when Muslims push themselves to work hard during the day for very obvious reasons.

Look, the blunt reality is that things like this have happened in real life. Cities have been evacuated, destroyed, people have actually experienced this. It is never simple, nor easy, nor orderly, nor safe. You may be able to sit in a comfortable armchair and fantasize about it being safe, but it isn't, for a host of very complex reasons that all boil down to "amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics." How to make a thing happen, mechanically, with all the little complications that arise when you try to provide for the needs of hundreds of thousands of people in an emergency, is a very difficult and complicated problem, even with a well organized and supportive government in place.

And Mosul doesn't have such a government. It has Da'esh.

[Honorius]

While I don't disagree that preventing the destruction of a modern city is more important than protecting the ruins of an ancient one, the 'you aren't personally willing to put yourself in danger therefore you have no right to speak' is a very weak argument. How have you, Honorius, personally exposed yourself to danger to protect civilian lives in Iraq and Syria?

I have gone at great risk to the Turkish Refugee Camps and helped with Humanitarian Aide by using my EMT License to provide what Care I could. That area is not exactly safe and I went at my own expense. My EMT Oath forbids me from doing harm to others or bearing arms. I also work in the Benton Harbor area which is quite dangerous in Summer when gang violence spikes and on more than one call only good observation skills and quick reactions kept I and my partner from becoming held hostage. I've even been shot at twice on two separate occasions, and several of my Partners have been shot at as well and one actually wounded.

Our Brother Service PrideCare has it even worse in Kalamazoo, they actually lost people killed by firearms when responding to calls.

Bear in mind, we don't wear a ballistics vests and our uniforms make us look like Police Officers, so drug addled patients who are potentially armed may decide to shoot at us first then ask questions later. Several patients have even tried to stab me or my partner on occasions.

So I put my life on the line on a regular basis.

[madd0ct0r]

I did read the whole thing (it's mostly graphs and tables and pictures) and nowhere does it mention deaths or a destructive tsunami wave of doom. As the table quoted above is titled it talks about inundation. In that light I take that to mean 100,000 people will be in the flooded zone, not 100,000 people will die. Some of those will die I am sure, but the paper doesn't say silent on that.

I'm not sure what you'd call the front face of a 25m high bulge of water moving at 3.5m/s.

There wil be many more people in the flooded zone. The paper discusses the old population of Mosul (1.7 million) and notes that half the city area is flooded. This number is also in alignment with skimmer's one for the length of Tigris total.

[Patroklos]

That wave is not going to be the same height throughout the flood zone, and the paper again says nothing about deaths or even destruction of buildings for that matter. It very deliberately uses the word inundate.

[Zaune]

Can we all just agree that, whatever the precise details, it's going to be a terrible disaster and we should be doing everything up to and including letting ISIS win to prevent it?

[Captain Seafort]

Can we all just agree that, whatever the precise details, it's going to be a terrible disaster and we should be doing everything up to and including letting ISIS win to prevent it?

No. No more than we should have let the Nazis or the Japanese win had a similar situation arisen in the 40s, because ISIS is as evil as they were.

[Simon_Jester]

Can we all just agree that, whatever the precise details, it's going to be a terrible disaster and we should be doing everything up to and including letting ISIS win to prevent it?

Yes to the first and no to the second.

Even if we assume for the sake of argument that it is the lesser evil to let Da'esh win (which I don't actually concede)... that doesn't matter.

Letting Da'esh win wouldn't solve the problem. Nor would it have solved the problem if we'd let them win a year or two ago.

The trouble is, Da'esh is in large part a decentralized, theocratic state dominated by self-appointed warlords leading "militias" of religious fanatics. Such a state, with at best a feudal level of organization, is incapable of reliably maintaining modern infrastructure. As we saw, Da'esh's reaction to capturing this enormous unstable dam, which actively threatens a city they just conquered, was to chase off the foreigners maintaining the dam. And loot some of the equipment. While coalition forces blowing up construction equipment didn't help, the construction equipment was never going to solve the problem, given that Da'esh had already chased off the workforce responsible for maintaining the dam.

It would appear that Da'esh is now generously willing to allow foreign contractors to come in and try to fix the dam, now that there is an imminent threat... but this is after the dam went dangerously un-maintained for over a year! Which happened purely because Da'esh was so busy terrorizing and shaking down its own subjects, and killing or driving off foreign experts, that it made no provision for the continued upkeep of the dam.

If it weren't for the actions of Da'esh, the dam would still be getting regular maintenance, just as it did under Saddam and the US occupation and the post-occupation Iraqi government. Without Da'esh, there wouldn't be an urgent problem with the dam in the first place!

So basically, letting Da'esh win for the sake of preserving the dam is "double-wrong." Not only is there a great chance it will lead to greater long term evils than even the destruction of the dam, but it is entirely likely that the result will be that the dam gets destroyed anyway even if Da'esh wins. Even if Da'esh is willing to accede to someone fixing the dam right now, the odds that they could keep it maintained indefinitely sound pretty slim, because it is not clear they can keep their own followers from harassing the dam workers and shutting down their operations.

[Broomstick]

Regarding the population death stats:

http://www.iwtc.info/2009_pdf/4-1.pdf

and this table:



that's 100 thousand, not one million. It's also ten hospitals, 5 water treatment plants and 2 power plants and the associated lines. just below the table is also noted this.

The main findings demonstrate that an area of 252 km2 along Tigris River between dam site and Mosul city which was classified as very good agricultural lands and was utilized by the villagers there will be flooded due to Mosul dam failure in the worst failure scenario, the maximum flood depth at Mosul city will be 25 meter and the flood elevation will be 235.2 meter above see level and the maximum flood discharge will be (207632) m3/sec with an average flow velocity 3.5 m/sec. The flood wave will cover about 54% of the Mosul city in which the areas of the eastern bank of the city
will be subjected to flood slightly more than the western bank.

That's 252km2 of farmland scoured out or buried. This wave isn't going to be clean water, it's going to dig the upper reaches of the river back to bedrock and dump the sand and mud as it loses energy, especially flowing over a rough surface like a city.
Plus the stuff downstream of the city which will have all the oils, shit and pollutants mixed in.

Not to mention that being immersed in meters of water will do no building structures any good whatsoever. It really will hit more like a tsunami than anything else, the initial impact – and it will be an impact, not a slow rise – will be destructive in and of itself. Go back and look at the live video of the Japanese tsunami, see what sort of damage a wave of water just 5 or 7 or 10 meters does. Water flows will undermine foundations. You could get sink holes. Building collapses. Then the water is going to stand there for awhile, because it won't simply recede overnight. You'll have on-going water damage, mold, and almost certainly raw sewage mixing with the mess.

On the upside, unlike New Orleans they won't have to worry about hungry, giant, flesh-eating lizards cruising the flooded streets because I don't think they have gator-type critters along that part of the Tigris.

Well yes, but you've got longer than 1-2 hours to get out, so there is plenty of leeway.

That's assuming there will be a timely warning. You'll have parents needing to gather up children who won't see the necessity of acting rapidly. The old and disabled, the injured and sick...

Again, look at New Orleans. They had TWO DAYS to evacuate the city and tens of thousands were still left in harm's way. What makes you think Mosul could do even as well as that in 3-5 hours?

I don't know why it took so long to evacuate everyone from New Orleans. Maybe they didn't take the storm as seriously as they could have done? If I remember correctly they were caught unprepared because they were expecting to see the flood defences hold up against a storm surge but the river burst its banks instead and went around the flood defences.

>sigh<

It took “so long” to evacuate as many as they did from New Orleans because it's very difficult to evacuate a city. You seem to have some trouble grasping this fact. A couple of points:

1) They were unable to evacuate the entire city, even with two days to do it. Tens of thousands remained behind, and that in a city half the size of Mosul with an arguably better/more effective government and outside help.

2) They were unable to evacuate the entire city despite making all the roads connected to the city one-way – in other words, in addition to the freeway lanes that always lead out of the city, they reversed the traffic on the outbound lanes, essentially doubling road capacity overnight... and it still wasn't enough.

3) It was well known that the flood defenses would fail. They were engineered for no more than a category 3 hurricane. It was known that Katrina would land as a category 5. Some years before National Geographic had published an article predicting such an upcoming catastrophe. Prior to the evacuation authorities openly stated they expected the levees to fail in order to urge people to take the evacuation seriously.

4) The evacuation of New Orleans was actually considered highly successful – 80-90% of residents of the greater metro area did, in fact, leave the danger zone.

5) New Orleans flooding was actually just under 5 meters at deepest. Despite that, in the wealthiest nation in the world, in a stable political climate with able outside assistance, New Orleans has still not fully recovered. Population is down, there are still neighborhood riddled with wrecked homes and other buildings and flood debris.

6) In other words, the New Orleans evacuation pre-Hurricane Katrina is a best case scenario... and still no one is happy with it.

7) Mosul will not have two days. Mosul will, if fortunate, have 5 hours. Mosul will be horrific disaster area if the dam fails.

Also in an emergency situation you don't need to be as polite about, say, jumping over walls or going through people's gardens if the crowd gets too thick on the path.

You're still thinking like a fit, young man. Maybe YOU could climb/jump walls but a lot of other people can't. I might be able to do that, but my spouse absolutely can not, as just one example. Most people are not going to be able to parkour around obstacles.

I'm not taking about scaling huge walls, just going over small walls and walking off the paths a bit. Look at the picture Patroklos gave of Mosul a page back. There's lots of wide open spaces away from the main paths people could go through if the main paths get too crowded.

Have you ever tried to walk 16 km through an urban landscape? I have actually done so, on a calm day, as a fit young woman in my 20's. It still left me very tired. YOU try it.

Then add in “small walls” and “off path” to the whole hike and it becomes quite a bit more even for the young and fit. Now add in a panic-prone, fearful crowd with people of all levels of ability, age, etc. and quite a few trying to lug worldly possessions.... this is not the walk in the park you seem to think it is.

And I don't know what barriers there are to those “wide open spaces”. Chicago has plenty of “wide open spaces” you can't access without proper keys because they're surrounded by fences 2 meters or more in height.

In the (admittedly unlikely right now) event of a coordinated evacuation response, it would make sense to close the roads apart from the elderly or disabled or people taking them, so they could get out via car whilst everyone else walks.

Geez, NO, that's a terrible idea – you want as many people to get as far away as possible, preferably encouraging them to go to other cities where the infrastructure will be intact, because that will reduce your local post-flood refugee problem.

A big problem, of course, are the sick, disabled and elderly who are just not as easy to move as the healthy, able-bodied young people. Deaths will be disproportionately among the former group.

I'm talking about buying resources when they get there. It's not going to be difficult for people to take a wallet with them. But let's say looting does happen. It's still not going to be the end of the world. Going back to your New Orleans example, looting happened there and the vast majority of the people who went through that storm are still alive.

Oh really? With what money? There will be shortages and price gouging, there always is. Refugees will have trouble accessing their money in a very short time period. Most of them will no longer have any income.

And they stopped the looting in Louisiana by calling in the National Guard – in other words, trained soldiers pointing loaded guns at the people thinking of breaking the law. No way that could go wrong in the Middle East, right? Hell, Louisiana had some instances of looters being shot winding up in court, for all I know there are still legal cases pending. I'll also point out that any state National Guard in the US is better trained and equipped, and more disciplined, then the yahoos currently running Mosul.

[Honorius]

The trouble is, Da'esh is in large part a decentralized, theocratic state dominated by self-appointed warlords leading "militias" of religious fanatics. Such a state, with at best a feudal level of organization, is incapable of reliably maintaining modern infrastructure. As we saw, Da'esh's reaction to capturing this enormous unstable dam, which actively threatens a city they just conquered, was to chase off the foreigners maintaining the dam. And loot some of the equipment. While coalition forces blowing up construction equipment didn't help, the construction equipment was never going to solve the problem, given that Da'esh had already chased off the workforce responsible for maintaining the dam.

It would appear that Da'esh is now generously willing to allow foreign contractors to come in and try to fix the dam, now that there is an imminent threat... but this is after the dam went dangerously un-maintained for over a year! Which happened purely because Da'esh was so busy terrorizing and shaking down its own subjects, and killing or driving off foreign experts, that it made no provision for the continued upkeep of the dam.

If it weren't for the actions of Da'esh, the dam would still be getting regular maintenance, just as it did under Saddam and the US occupation and the post-occupation Iraqi government. Without Da'esh, there wouldn't be an urgent problem with the dam in the first place!

So basically, letting Da'esh win for the sake of preserving the dam is "double-wrong." Not only is there a great chance it will lead to greater long term evils than even the destruction of the dam, but it is entirely likely that the result will be that the dam gets destroyed anyway even if Da'esh wins. Even if Da'esh is willing to accede to someone fixing the dam right now, the odds that they could keep it maintained indefinitely sound pretty slim, because it is not clear they can keep their own followers from harassing the dam workers and shutting down their operations.

IS doesn't control the dam and are well outside of artillery range of it. Also when they briefly took it, they brought in Syrian Dam Engineers from their Syrian Holdings to work on it, lowered the Reservoir cache, and connected the electricity to the city.

So IS was maintaining the dam and actually starting work on the incomplete Badush Dam which was supposed to be a failsafe in case the Mosul Dam failed, till 1991 Gulf War intervened followed by American mismanagement.

Then Obama jumped in deciding after US oil interests (Lets not pretend otherwise) in the KRG became threatened. The US and Kurds retook the dam, damaging its structures heavily. For all its talk about pin point strikes, a 2000lb bomb hitting a target isn't pinpoint and the Kurds fired a lot of artillery and rockets at the Dam to retake it whereas IS took the Dam without a fight. The US also targeted heavy equipment IS was using to finish the Badush Dam.

So this disaster is the KRG's fault primarily. They hold the dam and good distance buffer for over a year, they have plenty of engineers running other dams, and many are members of the Peshmerga who should have been ordered to the dam and arrested and forced to go if necessary. Their neglect to moved engineers to a secured site to effect repairs is theirs and theirs alone.

Next in line of responsibility is the Obama Administration which didn't prioritize Iraq first and wasted the majority of airstrikes on Kobane saving the Syrian Branch of the PKK Terrorist Organization when those Air Strikes could have enabled the KDP Peshmerga to advance on Badush and Mosul, prevented Hit from falling, and allowed the PMU to focus on advancing from their initial victory at Baiji rather than redeploying to clean up Anbar and losing Baiji again and forcing them to fight an even worse battle. At every step Obama backed the wrong factions and disregarded Erdogan's plans which would have worked and now has undone NATO's southern flank and opened Turkey up to renewed PKK Terrorism which wouldn't have happened if Obama had stood by Turkey and poured full support to the FSA to seize Manbij and Jarabulus last year instead of throwing support to YPG to take Sarrin, a minor town that even with carpet bombing took six months for YPG to take while in the same time frame, the FSA cleared the Syrian Regime from Idlib without any air support.

Then next is Haider Abadi who is the man at the top who should have prioritized the repairs of the Mosul Dam.

IS are scum, but lets accuse them of shit they actually did rather than attribute shit they didn't do to them as it allows others to escape responsibility for their actions. Bad as they are they aren't Nazi level, that is a whole other level from what IS does at its worse. The Nazis aimed to kill every woman and child of their enemies, real or imagined, because of who they were born to and extended it to those with even a grandparent who might have been one of their racial enemies and did it by factory murder. IS hasn't descended to that level and their forces are diverse in their ethnicity and country of origin.

[Patroklos]

Do you have any sources for this artillery/bomb damage? You were quite specific, so make sure said source includes "2000lbs" bomb. Keep in mind an entire JSOW weighs 1000lbs all told, including the warhead. Only the largest JDAMs reach 2000lbs.

[Simon_Jester]

Honorius, thank you for your attempt to review of the full sequence of events regarding the dam; I appear to have been operating under a number of misconceptions and appreciate your efforts to clarify the matter. While I will say nothing about the motives for actions, I recognize that my previous statements about responsibility for the damage to the dam are in error.

Even if you were only partly right (I don't presume to say anything on this), you would still have proven that I made mistakes.
___________________

I will be blunt, however, in noting that Da'esh's level of evil, compared to that of the Nazis, strikes me as mostly a question of who's the target, what they're being targeted for, and how organized the atrocities are.

Da'esh practices outright slavery for an increasing percentage of women, and near-slavery conditions for all women, in the areas they occupy. That's half the human race on their target list for enslavement (though not annihilation) right there.

They have made sincere attempts to exterminate ethnic minorities in their territory of influence on religious grounds; their theoretical willingness to spare the life of a convert (they might or might not do this) does NOT reassure me.

If they had the resources and freedom of action the Nazis enjoyed in Europe, and the ability to exercise their control over a comparable number of people for a comparable length of time, I suspect they would manage to commit atrocities of comparable scale. Therefore, I do not think comparisons to the Nazis inappropriate.

Thankfully, we will probably never have a chance to do a 'controlled experiment' of whether Da'esh turns out to be as bad as, less bad than, or worse than, the Nazis when given the full resources of an industrialized nation and most of a decade to lord it over 300-400 million people.

[Zeropoint]

I know perfectly well that such a thing could never, ever happen in today's political climate, to the point that even having the idea occur to me is probably going to get me a lot of weird looks, but:

It seems to me that it would be possible to deploy the US military to the dam, bring in the Army Corps of Engineers, and fix the dam. Yeah, it would cost money, but the military costs gobs of money already, and surely saving lives is a better use of money than ending them. We don't seem to have any problem spending a trillion dollars to kill people in the middle east; why should we balk at spending a few billion to save some?

[Simon_Jester]

Using civilian contractors who have actual experience specific to dam maintenance is preferable, but this is not objectively a bad idea. If we were approaching the issue blank slate I would say go for it.

[Patroklos]

There is the immediate issue, but the real problem is that the damn is just flawed. It needs constant maintenance, and that means unless you are talking about an indefinite deployment as soon as we leave (assuming the same regional circumstances) we are right back were we started.

[Sea Skimmer]

It seems to me that it would be possible to deploy the US military to the dam, bring in the Army Corps of Engineers, and fix the dam.

They would just use civilian contractors to do this work anyway. They have very little of there own equipment and workers. As it is the plan is Italian contractors overseen by the Italian government and military and probably aided by no small number of other engineers do the work. The Army Corps of Engineers isn't like a bunch of WW2 seabees whom show up and start building things by hand. Such units still exist, but hell if any of them are trained or equipped for deep drilling and grout injection.

[Simon_Jester]

Pretty much the whole army nowadays relies on contractors for everything that isn't directly related to shooting things or other operations that must occur in a combat zone, and some things that do, as I understand it. Kind of a consequence of how proportionately expensive paying a soldier's salary has gotten, compared to the cost of paying civilians.

Am I mistaken?

[Elheru Aran]

It seems to me that it would be possible to deploy the US military to the dam, bring in the Army Corps of Engineers, and fix the dam.

They would just use civilian contractors to do this work anyway. They have very little of there own equipment and workers. As it is the plan is Italian contractors overseen by the Italian government and military and probably aided by no small number of other engineers do the work. The Army Corps of Engineers isn't like a bunch of WW2 seabees whom show up and start building things by hand. Such units still exist, but hell if any of them are trained or equipped for deep drilling and grout injection.

IIRC, the modern equivalent of the Seabees do mostly forward base building, bulldozing roads and laying rough airstrips, that kind of thing. Definitely not major public-works type scale things like repairing dams.