Published October 31st, 2007 by Future Atlas
Iraq: a disastrous discontinuity?
The Washington Post reported yesterday that there is a way for things to suddenly get much worse in Iraq: a giant dam could collapse, releasing a 143-square-mile reservoir on the Tigris River. This would destroy much of the city of Mosul, which lies downstream, and could drown as many as 500,000 people.
No one interviewed for the article ventures an estimate of probabilities for the event. Some Iraqi engineers are skeptical about the level of danger, while some American officials are said to think that “the dam could collapse any day.”