U.S. warns of ‘catastrophic failure’ of Iraq’s Mosul Dam
The United States is ringing alarm bells about the deadly consequences of a breach in the Mosul Dam in northern Iraq, warning publicly over the weekend that a collapse of the 30-year old dam could sow havoc and destruction over a large swath of central Iraq. The unusually public warning from U.S. diplomats suggests that […]Keith Johnson writes for Foreign Policy:
The United States is ringing alarm bells about the deadly consequences of a breach in the Mosul Dam in northern Iraq, warning publicly over the weekend that a collapse of the 30-year old dam could sow havoc and destruction over a large swath of central Iraq. The unusually public warning from U.S. diplomats suggests that Baghdad has not moved with sufficient urgency to address the dam’s structural problems, nor prepared Iraqis for a possible evacuation, despite years of increasingly alarmed assessments by American technicians.
“Mosul Dam faces a serious and unprecedented risk of catastrophic failure with little warning,” the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad said Sunday in astatement. The embassy also put out a fact sheet on the consequences of a dam collapse, painting an apocalyptic picture of an “inland tidal wave” wreaking devastation along hundreds of miles of flood path from northern Iraq to Baghdad itself. The embassy warned that a dam breach could threaten the lives of 500,000 to 1.5 million Iraqis, knock out the country’s electricity system, and severely disrupt Iraqi agriculture.
