The Power Of Water Is Great

-and by "great" I don't mean "nifty," I mean "freaking terrifying."

One spring my family drove to town, a pretty short trip-- at one point, there's a ditch above the road.  When we went in, there was no water spilling, no indication of trouble, it was fine.

We hit the grocery store, visited a little, and drove back-- but the blacktop was 75% gone when we came around a corner, and in the five minutes it took us to get out, station folks to stop anyone from rear ending us and back up to the top of the hill so we could turn around, it was entirely gone.  The ditch got plugged.

Not a "lot" of water, if you picture an oil barrel on its side, it might fill the bottom quarter and a leaf on top might go a foot every second or two, but it went over the blacktop, dug out the rocky soil under it, and collapsed the road under their combined weight in a gash that was five feet at the narrowest point.

I also grew up around a lot of dams (Shasta dam was COOL!-- I don't remember where it was, but I also remember being told about places where my uncles had boated out and gotten pictures of houses under the water as children) so I got in the habit of trying to figure out what the area looked like before the dam was their, see where weak points were, that kind of thing.

All of this to get the point of saying: this visual is incredibly terrifying.

Nasser, in his great wisdom, decided to build a high dam across the Nile River at Aswan. The lake behind it holds 111 cubic kilometers of water.

Now, most of the population of Egypt lives in a rather narrow valley on the banks of the Nile. This valley is actually a canyon for a good part of its length.

In a war, the Aswan Dam would be an obvious target: it supplies much of Egypt's water and power.

What happens if someone drops the dam suddenly? Well, all of that 111 cubic-kilometer lake that happens to be above the level of the main river surges downstream, a mighty hydraulic ram, erasing everything for many, many kilometers downstream. Villages, towns, cities, people ... millions would perish. The only parts of the river that would be mostly safe would be in the Delta, where the terrain fans out, and even there the surge of water would probably do some damage.

From Jordan179.