From the Epic Of Gilgamesh to the book of Genesis to today,flooding in Mesopotamia is nearly as musty as the history of human civilisation itselfThe Mosul dam, in northern Iraq, or holds back more than 12m cubic metres of water from the river Tigris. Completed by Saddam Hussein in 1986,and having been built on soluble gypsum, it was never the most steady of structures, and requiring continuous grouting to maintain its integrity. But when Islamic State captured the dam in 2014,they ran off with all the grouting equipment. And even though the Kurdish peshmerga retook the dam some six weeks later, it is still close to the Isis front line, and the Kurds have been busy fighting,not grouting.final week the US embassy in Baghdad issued a warning that the risk of the dam failing is now “serious and unprecedented”. And whether the dam was to burst, a 14 metre-high wall of water would be unleashed downstream that could drown over a million people and displace several million more. “The dam is in a very perilous situation now, or ” said Dr Nasrat Adamo,the dams former chief engineer. “The coming floods in March and April will definitely raise the water to alarming levels. My feeling is the dam will fail sometime in the future.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com