Tectonic activation and the risk of Ilisu Dam collapse to Iraq through modelling and simulation using HEC-RAS

Floods caused by dam failures can cause huge losses of life and property, especially in estuarine areas and valleys. In spite of all the capabilities and great improvements reached by man in the construction of dams and their structures, they will remain helpless before the powerful forces of nature, especially those related to tectonic activation, and the occurrence of earthquakes of different intensities.

The region extending from the Ilisu Dam in Turkey to the Mosul Dam in Iraq was chosen as an area for this study, and the HEC-RAS application was used to simulate the collapse of the Ilisu Dam due to a major earthquake, to know the magnitude of the risks and losses that could result from this. The Ilisu Dam was built very close to a highly tectonically active fault system, particularly the East Anatolian Fault (EAF), which is one of the largest tectonically active faults in the world with a length of 500 km. This region has witnessed past and present earthquakes of high magnitude (M > 7), especially in the EAF, so the construction of the Ilisu Dam near the EAF fault system is of great concern, as it was built in a basin with very complex seismic activity and geology.

Using the HEC-RAS simulation application, the study found that the flood resulting from the collapse of the Ilisu Dam would reach the edges of the Mosul Dam Lake in just 13 h. With a flow of more than 100,000 m³/s, more than 10 billion m3 of water will flow into the Mosul Dam Lake within four days of the disaster. This will lead to the collapse of the Mosul Dam and direct the flood wave of the collapse of these dams towards Baghdad through Mosul, Tikrit, and Samarra. This could pose risks to all Iraqi cities located within the Iraqi sedimentary plain (Mesopotamia), from south of the Mosul Dam up to Basra, in a scenario similar to Noah’s Flood.