Dexter Filkins, the primary Middle East correspondent for The New Yorker, has written a genuinely terrifying story about the Mosul Dam in Iraq. The terrifying part is not that the dam was temporarily occupied by ISIS, but that it sits on a foundation of soluble rock and requires a constant flow of concrete to be pumped into the ground in order for it to remain stable. Many with whom Filkins spoke believe that the battle to keep the dam intact ultimately will be lost, resulting in a catastrophic breach that will inundate the Tigris Valley below and send a sixteen-foot wave into Baghdad itself. The disaster would kill as many as a million and a half people.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/a-bigger-problem-than-isis
According to the article, the current government in Baghdad has taken a laissez-faire approach to the problem, with no plan to address it or any intention of developing one. It is an object lesson in the human capacity to ignore even life-threatening realities. Constructed under Saddam Hussein’s watch, the dam also testifies to the frequent incompetence of dictatorships, a condition to which even Hitler’s Germany was not immune. Unlike the oft-quoted wisdom regarding all-powerful leaders, they do not do a particularly good job of making trains run on time.
