Patrick Lasswell puts a damper on my vision of Biblical catastrophe. He says he’s sorry to do it, but I don’t think he is.

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful Allahpundit!

Hey, I live in Portland! We have a lot of dams around here, as well as idiot black bloc anarchists and the lefties who enable them. Even though I consider the likelihood of dam failure as remote, I live 100′+ above the Willamette and Columbia.

They themselves admit regularly that “this election is about Iraq”… So who “likes” this war, you POSs?

RightWinged on December 17, 2007 at 2:06 PM

Hey RW, I was over reading AJ Strata last night and he’s got a post that connects the dots better than pretty much anyone else I’ve read so far. Well worth a read.

If the dam was suddenly disappeared, that would be true, but we are dealing with flow rates. This isn’t going to come in a massive wave, this is going to come as a trickle, then a flood, then a trickle. How long that takes and how much of a flood is speculation.

I can say from my observation of Mosul that the geography will tend to damp rather than intensify any flood this dam failure produces. When Michael Totten and I were looking for a vantage point to take pictures of Mosul in March of this year, we had to settle for an old anti-aircraft mound because that was the highest point we could find near the city.

I uploaded a picture I took of Mosul, the light was crap that day so I had to tweak it a bit. To the right you can see another anti-aircraft mound, notice that this is the dominant terrain feature. http://www.moderaterisk.net/images/mosul is flat2.jpg

Instead there will be a 30-40′ column of water that will exit with much less energy.

Call me crazy, but even if you’re right, this still sounds like something that could wipe out a city.

Yeah, things are messy, but the Iraqi Army is in Basra now. The militias will have to step lightly around them, because attacking the IA is lose-lose for them: the IA outguns them and is more popular with citizens. Maybe things will get worse, maybe they’ll get better, maybe they’ll muddle along about like they are now. Depends on how competent/corrupt the IA are.

Interesting points Patrick_Lasswell, thanks for sharing.

The write-up sound more like Reuters dream story denied and they are making up for it by reminding AQI of the targets that will make for a really good story.

For all their limitations, earthen dams are much less susceptible to explosions because the brisance is more readily absorbed by the comparatively loose structure. Concrete, which is substantially harder and generally a better material for building dams, is more susceptible to the brisance of the high explosives available to the terrorists (or Harrison Ford and Robert Shaw).

Additionally, unlike Hoover Dam, the Mosul dam is comparatively low. While it contains quite a lot of acre-feet of water, the height of the water column is not very substantial. I’ve been to the outskirts of Mosul, and there isn’t a significant hill in sight. There is no place to stack water up convenient to the dam. Since the dam was intended to provide agricultural water, that isn’t a big deal as a design issue. From a failure standpoint, this means that there won’t be a 200′ column of water being pushed out at high speeds through a breach. Instead there will be a 30-40′ column of water that will exit with much less energy.

I’m sorry to put a damper on Allahpundit’s visions of biblical catastrophe. Maybe he should go watch “Force 10 from Navarone” and hit the pause button during the Barbara Bach parts a lot to feel better.

Sounds to me like the driver didn’t want to be a suicide bomber. If he were going to drive full speed to the dam and blow it, he’d have to give his life doing so. Maybe that was the original plan and the bomber had 2nd thoughts at the end and decided to live to fight another day…

krabbas on December 17, 2007 at 2:10 PM

I was thinking the same thing. Usually they’ll blow themselves up with it. No martyrdom today?

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gkx-3oYeFwuWKCusr2jrojs98w8wD8TIU33G0

BAGHDAD (AP) — Violence in Iraq is at its lowest levels since the first year of the American invasion, finally opening a window for reconciliation among rival sects, the second-ranking U.S. general said Sunday as Iraqi forces formally took control of security across half the country.

I’ve been one of the most cautious in all this “great news out of Iraq!” stuff, because that can turn very easily when the Democrats start making bold promises of surrender, and the enemy responds with desperate attacks to expedite things. And cautious because:

“We have a window, I don’t know how long that window is, but there is a window because of the security to move forward,” Odierno told a small group of journalists at his headquarters in Baghdad. “We need to get policies in place by the central government to do this.”

BUT, what I think is the most important takeaway here… is that the Democrats, who wanted Bush to take a “new course” (or whatever the catch phrase is this week). He did, and by all accounts it’s working (so far). Yet they still are running on “pull out”. No matter how many times they say “new course” “new direction”, etc. All they’ll accept (for purely political reasons) is withdrawal, because they interpret polls showing anti-war sentiment as “Americans want us to surrender”. I’ve ranted on these evil SOBs before, I don’t need to go off on that tangent.

I’m just saying, it’s pretty frustrating, and yet another example of how these Dems are nothing but pure evil. They refuse to acknowledge the successes. Pelosi was just out with her “Republicans like this war” and Bush won’t “change direction” crap again last week! They WANT us to lose because that’s a big boost for them in the elections. We’ve seen some of them slip and admit this, and in a way, Pelosi’s whole “Republicans like this war” was along the same lines… but in reality, it is they who LOVE this war, because it gives them an issue. I mean, it was the Dems who spent 13 years making the WMD case until they flipped to create a wedge issue before the 2004 elections and started calling Bush a liar. They still lost that year, but it wouldn’t even have been close if not for pulling that crap.

They themselves admit regularly that “this election is about Iraq”… So who “likes” this war, you POSs?