WORLD WATCH
Cataclysmic Events Ancient and Modern By Randall Carlson
I wrote last month about a potential disaster that could occur in Iraq if the Mosul Dam fails. I described the conditions of the dam that was built during the Saddam Hussein regime on the Tigris River and the circum- stances which has brought it to the brink of collapse.
Assuming that the dam fails catastrophically, which it would be likely to do if it failed at all, 2.7 cubic miles of water will be rapidly introduced into the Tigris River Valley almost instantaneously. That is a lot of water. A massive flood surge will sweep downriver at a rate of about 10 miles per hour, although, initially, much faster. It will travel roughly 40 miles by river from the dam breakout point to the city of Mosul in about 4 hours. The wave could be over 70 feet high as it reaches Mosul. 22 hours later the wave, by now about reduced to about 50 feet high, will reach Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein. 400 miles downriver from the dam is the City of Baghdad. When the flood hits Baghdad, about two days after dam failure, the surge will spread out inundating some 80 square miles of the city, with large sections near the river, the very heart of the city, under 13 feet of water.
The death toll, not only from the flood itself, but also from the chaotic aftermath, could be a million people or more. The flood would likely knock out Iraq’s electrical system and cause severe effects on agriculture, which is practiced extensively in the fertile bottomlands of the Tigris Valley. There will be a massive population displacement. The flood wave will sweep all before it: cars, trees, wreckage of buildings, corpses of humans and animals, unexploded ordinance. The archaeologi- cal tragedy will also be profound. The ruins of ancient Ninevah among other sites, lie in the path of the flood.
On February 29 of this year the U. S. Embassy in Iraq issued a warning, calling the situation “seri- ous and unprecedented.” On Tuesday, March 8, U.S. Central Command briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee on the developing situation. General Lloyd Austin III stated to the committee that “if the dam fails, it will be catastrophic.” On Wednesday, March 9, after a briefing at the United Nations, Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. echoed General Austin’s opin- ion that a dam failure would be catastrophic and called upon U.N. member nations to lend their support, tweet- ing: “Work to stabilize Mosul dam must begin ASAP but all countries must step up to fund relief & public edu- cation on evacuation routes”.
Another of the original engineers who worked on the dam, Nadhir al-Ansari, told Newsweek magazine that with spring warmth snowmelt will significantly increase the pressure on the already weakened dam. “In April and May, there will be a lot more snow melting and it will bring plenty of water into the reservoir,” he said. “I
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don’t think the dam will withstand that pressure.” As I write these words U.S. and Iraqi officials are working on a plan to evacuate up to 1.47 million people—the same plan that Nasrat Adamo called “ridiculous.”
Since writing last month the Iraqi government has con- tracted with an Italian company to commence urgent repairs, which however, are yet to begin. On the upside one of the sluice gates is working and the reservoir is at present about 36 feet below full pool. But the condition of the bedrock below the dam is highly problematic and grouting operations are now underway. This process involves drilling boreholes into the porous bedrock and injecting up to two tons of concrete per day to prevent seepage, which if allowed to continue would quickly erode the limestone and gypsum bedrock to the point of failure.
If this dam fails the world will be confronted with a tragedy of epic, near biblical proportions. But it will also be presented with a lesson in mega-scale hydrology that, by extrapolation, could allow modern humankind a real sense of the scale of world-destroying floods expe- rienced by our ancestors in prehistoric times. However, it would be far better to derive whatever lessons are to be gleaned from this unfortunate situation by informed conjecture and computer models than to witness the possible death of more people than have been killed throughout the entire Iraq war. We will just have to wait and see what the outcome of this situation will be. Hopefully the Italian team can begin desperately needed repairs in time.
So here we are talking about a man-made flood, which, if it were to occur, would undoubtedly be one of the great humanitarian disasters of modern times. It is in the pondering of such a scenario that the sense of urgency wells up to do whatever it takes to stave off a tragedy of such magnitude. But, it should also pro- voke us to consider further the role that great fluvial catastrophes have played in human history and to seek after the causes of phenomenon such as mega-scale floods that are measured in millions to hundreds of million cubic feet per second.
It is of no small significance that most nations and cul- tures of the world have deep rooted myths of tremen- dous floods, which, if taken literally are clearly beyond the scope and scale of anything that can be referenced from modern experience. If you have been reading these articles you will know that I have just presented a plau- sible scenario for a natural cause capable of generating a tsunami flood of enormous magnitude in the vicinity of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, one capable of drowning any civilization inhabiting the lands adjacent to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. I have presented some considerable evidence in support of this possibil-
Oracle 20/20 June 2016
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