Yeah, I wonder why that one ran out of steam? BCON. Are all the electrical power problems fixed already ? Maybe they need to send the guys who worked so fast over to Iraq, I hear they need some electricity over there.
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newhousenews.com
KUT, Iraq -- If the Iraqi people are clamoring for one thing more than any other, it is power. And not the political kind.
Four months after the end of major combat, electricity remains an unreliable resource, and last week's mass outages in the United States did nothing to assure the Iraqis that the governing coalition has a ready solution to the problem.
In addition, propane, which most residents in Wassit Province southeast of Baghdad depend on for their cooking needs, is available only sporadically. A black market in gasoline is thriving.
Coalition officials insist they are doing all they can to remedy the spotty supply of power, but acknowledge privately that they need to resolve the issue soon. Last week, the on-again, off-again delivery of electricity in Basra, a southern city controlled by British forces, sparked lethal riots, and some people in Kut, where support for the U.S. Marines is strong, are nonetheless fuming about frequent and sometimes lengthy outages.
"I think the Americans could fix it in three or four days and they haven't done so for political reasons," said Adnan Khalaf, 26, a medical microbiologist looking for any work he can find in Kut. "Four months, why would it take four months?"
Khalaf's conclusion is correct, officers in Kut said, but he's wrong about the motive. The electricity shortage derives not from political tension between the coalition and the Iraqis, but from the internal politics of the coalition itself. It's the insatiable demand of Baghdad, they said, that sometimes leaves Wassit in the dark.
Under coalition guidelines, Wassit is supposed to receive 75 megawatts of electricity a day, enough to keep things running for three hours at a time and then three hours off, said Marine Lt. Col. David Couvillon, the province's provisional military governor. Supplying that meager flow shouldn't be a problem: More power than that usually courses through the city's station, which is tied to a network connecting Nasiriyah with Basra to the south and Baghdad.
But Baghdad sometimes makes spot decisions, demanding that Kut transfer all, or a big chunk, of its allotment to the capital at a moment's notice. Though Baghdad, a city of 5 million that is home to one in four Iraqis, has the greatest demand, Wassit officials are exasperated by the imperious and random nature of the orders.
At times, they disobey those orders to keep the peace. There have been a few cases in the past three months when Kut received more than 100 megawatts and Baghdad demanded the majority or all of it. Furious, the Marines in Kut kept about 40 megawatts, a bit more than half of their specified allowance, and sent the rest on, a decision that did not sit well with the coalition's top brass.
To be sure, even southern Iraq, where there is notably less sabotage and violence of the kind bedeviling the coalition in the north, vandals and terrorists have complicated matters. The wires and cables through which the power courses have been repaired in Wassit but not in Nasiriyah or other places in the network, said Army Sgt. Benjamin Kaye, who reports to Couvillon on electricity issues.
"Right now we have the capability to provide continuous power, but we're dependent on Nasiriyah and Baghdad, and the looting is the biggest problem. It's just devastating," Kaye said.
Kaye, who has developed a passing fluency in Arabic, is the systems manager at the Indian Point nuclear power plant in New York state, an Entergy subsidiary, and his knowledge of the situation in Iraq is encyclopedic.
As for the second part of Khalaf's contention, that things have gone too slowly, Kaye agreed but argued that resolving the issue with lightning speed was neither reasonable to expect nor desirable in the long run.
"Some of the towers that need to be rebuilt, those are huge, expensive projects that could take years," he said. "We could bring the Corps of Engineers here and do it all faster, and we want to show the Iraqis that the Americans are here helping. But at the same time we want to validate the provisional government and let them handle and solve some of the big problems."
A smaller, but no less pressing, problem involves propane gas. It's the staple fuel source in Wassit kitchens, and establishing a steady flow of it has proved a headache. At one point the Marines even had to pull their patrols off the street to provide security at propane-distribution points.
Between Aug. 1 and 8, only five propane trucks arrived in Kut, carrying a mere 1,500 cylinders of the precious fuel. The shortage leads to chaotic distribution. Kutians wait in long, snaking lines to refill their small tanks, and all the customers can't be satisfied.
"We were moving about 25,000 barrels a day, and you had thousands of people lining up at 4:30 a.m. for it," said Gunner Sgt. John Guidry. "And when you've got people waiting all day under a broiling sun and a lot of them are going to go home with nothing, well, naturally those guys aren't too happy about that."
The propane shortage has been a windfall for the merchants who drift through the town on donkey-pulled carts piled high with scraggly brushwood. Similarly, petrol is often more readily available at the black markets running along some of the city's big traffic circles. For 250 dinars a liter, less than a quarter of a dollar at the current exchange rate, the black market doesn't seem prohibitively expensive until it is compared with the 25-dinar charge at the pump.
Saboteurs have hit the two pipelines servicing Wassit, and as a result, the province relies exclusively on truck convoys for its liquid gas, and there's a serious shortage of trucks as well. Thus, the storage tanks in Kut, which can hold 14 million liters of benzene, 18 million liters of diesel and 19 million liters of kerosene, are far from full.
With the exception of propane, however, the situation has begun to improve, and on Tuesday, 15 trucks a day were supposed to be bringing 540,000 liters of diesel to Kut.
"By the end of this month, I expect our liquid fuel problem to be solved," Army Capt. Brian Stoll said. "But the propane, that's going to be broken for a while yet. The thing is, we're really at the mercy of everyone else."
Aug. 19, 2003 |
