I recently wrote about threats to dams in Syria (at "Syria's Looming Water Calamity") and Iraq (at "The Acute Danger of Iraqi Dams"); this topic raises the question of where and when dams have threatened those living downstream. To start, some cases of this outside of Syria and Iraq:
(1) In the beginning of World War I, on October 25, 1914, the Belgian Army opened the canal locks at Nieuwpoort, thereby flooding the Yser region of Flanders, ending the Battle of Yser, and halting the German army's advance. Here is a June 1915 account of "The Flooding of the Yser" by Belgium's Minister of Justice Carton De Wiart:
the Belgians, in this pitiless conflict, summoned to their aid a terrible and invincible assistant the inundation of low-lying lands. The canals in the valley of the Yser spilled their water into the fields. The water rose and streamed along the German trenches; while on the left bank, where the level of the soil was higher, the Belgians heroically defended their positions.
The Germans, threatened with death by drowning, rushed forward in a terrible offensive, seeking to break our lines, to conquer the dry land. In this unprecedented attempt they succeeded, on the 30th of October, in capturing one of our points of support, the village of Ramscappelle; but this essential position was immediately recaptured by two Belgian divisions and a few French battalions. This was the coup de grace.
On the 31st, decimated, dejected, defeated, the Germans abandoned their project of crossing the Yser; they retreated, abandoning guns and mortars engulfed in mire, enormous quantities of weapons, thousands of corpses, and many wounded.
(2) The 1938 breaching of Yellow River waterworks by the Chinese Nationalist forces fighting the Japanese invader has been called the "the largest act of environmental warfare in history." Here is the abstract of an article on the topic, "Drowned Earth: The Strategic Breaching of the Yellow River Dyke, 1938," Geoscience, November 1, 2009 pp. 287-297, by Diana Lary of the University of British Columbia:
Early in the war of resistance against Japan, the Chinese military command used a tragic version of scorched-earth tactics: they denied access to the Japanese imperial army to a vast stretch of China not by literally scorching it but by drowning it. In June 1938 the Chinese command turned the ultimate symbol of Chinese civilization, the Yellow River, into a weapon of war. The southern dyke of the River was breached at Huayuankou (Flower Garden Mouth) in Henan, 30 miles to the west of the Japanese vanguard. A cataclysmic flood swept through the breach, killing by the lowest estimate half a million people and turning millions of others into refugees.
The breach of the dyke was an attempt at strategic interdiction, to limit the mobility of the Japanese army and stop it moving further west. The waters of the River were to do what soldiers had not been able to do: to halt the Japanese advance. The breaching was a strategic move born of desperation. As the Japanese armies continued their relentless advance across China, sober strategic thinking in the Chinese command gave way to a mood close to panic, in which any conceivable action could be taken to stop the Japanese advance.
(3) In an incident hushed-up by Mao's dictatorship, the Banquiao Dam, built in 1952, collapsed 23 years later. Here is an account by Eric Fish in International Rivers:
On the night of Aug 8, 1975, a line of people frantically piled sandbags atop Henan Province's Banqiao Dam while being battered by the worst storm ever recorded in the region. They were in a race with the rapidly rising Ru River to save the dam and the millions of people that lay sleeping downstream. It was a race they were about to lose.
Just after 1:00 am, the sky cleared and stars emerged from behind the storm clouds. There was an eerie calm as someone yelled, "The water level is going down! The flood is retreating!"
There was little chance to enjoy that calm. One survivor recalled that a few seconds later it "sounded like the sky was collapsing and the earth was cracking." The equivalent of 280,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools burst through the crumbling dam, taking with it entire towns and as many as 171,000 lives.
In addition, the collapse caused about 11 million people to become homeless.
(4) The Teton Dam was an earthen dam on the Teton River in Idaho, United States. It was built by the Bureau of Reclamation, one of eight federal agencies authorized to construct dams. Located in the eastern part of the state, between Fremont and Madison counties, it suffered a catastrophic failure on June 5, 1976, as it was filling for the first time.
 The Teton Dam as the breach occurs. |
The collapse of the dam resulted in the deaths of 11 people and 13,000 cattle. The dam cost about $100 million to build, and the federal government paid over $300 million in claims related to its failure. Total damage estimates have ranged up to $2 billion. The dam has not been rebuilt.
 Imnam Dam in North Korea. |
Then back to Syria and Iraq, which are particularly susceptible to this sort of thinking:
(1) On January 11, 1258, the Mongol army under Hulagu broke the dikes near Baghdad and drowned many of the 20,000 Abbasid troops defending the capital city of caliphs going back five centuries, softening up the city for conquest.
(2) Early in the Iraq-Iran war, the journalist Paul Iddon writes, Saddam Hussein "discussed casually the possibility of flooding Tehran by destroying the dams to its north"; but this turned out not to be the case and the idea was dropped.
(3) Colin Powell, U.S. military chief of staff during the Kuwait war of 1990-91, explained a few years later that, had Saddam Hussein deployed chemical weapons and killed large numbers of American soldiers, the Pentagon had plans to flood Baghdad.
Knocking off the dams on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers would have caused enormous destruction downstream. The loss of civilian life would have been terrible and we really had not thoroughly analyzed [it]. We knew how to hit the dams, but I don't know if we analyzed what the effect downstream would have been. But nevertheless, it would have been a good one to threaten the Iraqis with.
(4) American planners worried at the start of the multinational attack in March 2003 that the Saddam Hussein regime would engage in "strategic flooding" by releasing waters from its dams (including the Mosul Dam, then known as the Saddam Dam), but it did not do so. (July 1, 2014)
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