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Comment by Hondor | Hacker News Reader

Way down the bottom, we see the problem is solved for at least the next year:

"Early in 2016, under American prodding, the Iraqis reopened negotiations with Trevi S.p.A., the Italian firm. In September, a team of engineers, hired at a cost of three hundred million dollars, arrived at the dam to perform a crash repair job. Their main task is to install updated equipment, designed to fill the voids beneath the dam more precisely, and to repair the broken control gate. Under the contract, the Italians will do the grouting for a year, and then leave the equipment with their Iraqi counterparts. The engineers say that they are confident they can prevent the dam’s foundation from washing away."

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The sentence folllowing that starts with But. 'Crash repair job' also doesn't instill confidence that it is a given this will work.

Also, this dam still is close to a war zone, if not in a war zone. That updated equipment may not make it there, can get destroyed in an attack, or the personnel doing the work can be 'persuaded' not to work or may outright be killed.

What surprises me most about this story is that they kept delivering power to the enemy, while they also could have let all or most of the water out. It wouldn't surprise me if money or backstabbing ("we'll keep delivering electricity if you focus on attacking your other enemies instead of on getting back the dam from us") was involved there.

Or, the existence of a functioning dam is of benefit to ISIS so they are less likely to destroy it (causing a catastrophe) than they would be if electrical supplies were cut off (?).

ISIS, being famously known for not doing things against their best interest.

It would be of a great benefit for them to see the dam destroyed, if they could convincingly pin it on the Iraqi government and/or Western countries.

This has been a pattern that has been seen over and over in Iraq. Contractors come in an build "state of the art" infrastructure to repair or replace existing infrastructure. This in itself is not a problem per se. There are two issues.

One is the local population lacks the training and expertise to run and maintain this "state of the art" infrastructure. Not that they couldn't become capable because they certainly could but their frame of reference is maintaining 40 or 50 year old infrastructure.

The second issue is that they don't have the financial means of maintaing this newly installed infrastructure. Their operating budget often can't accommodate the maintenance of such state of that art infrastructure. What's good for a first world contractors bottom line is not necessarily the best fit for a third world country's utility company.

This book details a lot of this and is worth a look:

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Money-Wasted-Billions-Corporate...

From the article it sounded like they were upkeeping the dam just fine, until ISIS came through and chased off the workers and maintenance wasn't performed. But I haven't read that book and this is just one article, just genuinely curious cause that seemed like a discrepancy.

I'm not sure if your point is applicable here. This is a dam from 1986, not some new fangled contraption no one understands. It has a known maintenance schedule and is old school technology. The problem is, ISIS decided to murder or chase off the staff who maintains the dam and didn't keep up with the work it needs.

Worse, the construction was done "on the cheap" as dictated by the Hussein regime. Instead of digging deeply into the delicate and soluble gypsum and grouting properly, the engineers were forced to use a shallow blanket-grout technique which simply requires more maintenance going forward as it failed to stop dissolution. Grouting on this dam is done six days a week. That's right, every day but Sunday since 1986. ISIS's pause of this created this crisis.

Contrary to your point, if it was done "first world style" it would be a much more stable dam, but instead the Hussein regime was too busy buying palaces and gold toilets to care too much about getting large scale projects right. Iraqis now much pay forward the technical debt of the shallow blanket grout until the dam is decommissioned. There is no alternative here and this dam should be a study of autocratic regime's attempts at cost savings which ultimately cost more in the long run and may eventually cause a human rights disaster. I believe 1m people are at risk of drowning if this dam collapses. These are non-trivial numbers.

Iraq had a lot of money back then and like in much of the developing world, mega-projects were sought after (and not just by despots).

The Mosul Dam was not built cheaply, it was rushed to completion to meet some idiotic deadline. The other options would likely not have cost much more (especially considering maintenance), but it would have taken more time.

And it was "first-world style", the consultants and construction firms were European just like the ones that built Kariba Dam. They had no problem building it nor any problem cashing the cheques.

The article says the dam was rushed because of the war with Iran that Saddam Hussein started in 1979.

Saddam had the crazy idea that he could conquer the Middle East and make Iraq into a world superpower. So he started a war with much larger Iran, the war stalemated and went on for 8 years, with enormous loss in human lives, and enormous debts piled up on the Iraqi side. That ended and Saddam invaded Kuwait to get its oil riches, leading to the Gulf War which Iraq quickly lost.

Saddam still wanted to build an empire, so he prevented full nuclear arms inspections to keep the rest of the Middle East afraid he still had a nuclear arms program, and in fact planned to re-start it after the inspection and sanctions program ended.

That lead to the Iraqi war, which Iraq quickly lost, and left Iraq so divided and disorganized that ISIS could arise and take much of the country, including temporarily taking the Mosul Dam. And the disorganized, corrupt government has bungled dealing with the threat of the dam collapsing, and so we are in the present, very dangerous situation.

So it all goes back to Saddam Hussein, and the generally poor political situation in Iraq, and beyond that, I would say, the Middle East as a whole.

I've heard though that, until the war at least, Iraq had a fairly top-notch science and engineering corps.

I'd speculate that this might be due to Baathist secularism and militarism, as well as the areas legacy of being arguably the intellectual center of the Muslim world.

The article also says many experts are scared to death it is going to collapse, and a chart of dangerous dams puts it much higher than any other. I bet that one of the conditions the Iraqi government insisted on including in the contract with Trevi S.p.A is that it says to the public it is sure it can prevent a collapse.

I think people should trust independent experts much more than companies under contract from a very corrupt and incompetent government. Don't you agree?

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