Italian specialists arrive to repair Mosul dam

Описание: (14 Apr 2016) A team of Italian specialists arrived on Thursday at the site of the Mosul Dam as part of an emergency campaign to repair Iraq's largest dam for fear that it will collapse.
The advanced team from the Italian engineering firm Trevi Group will set up a camp for the group of engineers who are expected to arrive within a few weeks.
US and Iraqi officials have warned that the dam is in imminent danger of collapse.
In late February, the US embassy in Baghdad called the dam's risk of collapse "serious and unprecedented," and Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi asked Mosul residents along the Tigris river to move at least six kilometres (3.7 miles) away from its banks.
The dam's core problem is that it was shoddily built on unstable ground.
From the day it was inaugurated in 1985, maintenance crews have had to continuously pour cement under its foundation.
Without that constant injection, known as "grouting", the 113-meter-high dam would soon collapse into a hole in the ground, causing an unprecedented disaster.
The 30 mile (48 kilometres) long lake behind it would explode down the Tigris River valley with hundreds of millions of cubic meters of water, ramming into Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, currently home to more than 700,000 people about 40 miles (64 kilometres) downriver.
It would then flood all the way down to Baghdad, some 340 miles south (547 kilometres).


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