ENGINEERING CHANGE
Rebuilding Iraq Takes Courage, Cash and Improvisation
By JAMES GLANZ
IN the pounding heat last August, near ancient Babylon, a group of American and Iraqi engineers and local Shiite workers gathered to flip the switch on a refurbished irrigation system for 200,000 acres of land that had become parched during years of neglect under Saddam Hussein's rule. All seemed ready, but the Iraqis refused to try the switch before improving their luck.
A local man strode forward with a pair of sheep. He deftly slit their throats with a sharp knife and spurted blood on the ground before hanging the dead animals by their hind legs next to a power generator.
The engineers flipped the switch, the system worked and the Iraqis served soft drinks and store-bought cookies in what otherwise, except for the sheep, could have been a ribbon-cutting in Spokane.
As the shadow of violence lengthens across the desert landscape of Iraq, reconstruction quietly continues. For some, the pace has been too slow. For others, success is more rightly measured in small moments — as when, whether by skill or sacrifice, an irrigation system goes back online.
What is certain, though, is that when the United States begins spending the roughly $13 billion in new money earmarked earlier this month for the organs of Iraq's vitality — water and sewage treatment, transportation, electricity and communications networks, oil production — it will have to use the past six months as a vast how-to manual. It is a guidebook that, even today, remains decidedly ad-hoc and governed by the bald, decrepit and sometimes dangerous realities encountered on the ground.
Rebuilding in Mid-Battle
The rebuilding effort began almost as soon as hostilities did. Military engineers were deployed a few days after the war began at the port of Umm Qasr, adjacent to Kuwait in southeastern Iraq, said Rear Adm. Charles R. Kubic, who commanded about 5,000 engineers in the First Marine Expeditionary Force Engineer Group, many of them Seabees, and who would later work on the irrigation system near Babylon.
By late April, as the main hostilities wound down, dredging of the silt-choked port had started, with an eye to making it deep enough — about 40 feet from less than half that in some places — to accommodate enormous grain ships for humanitarian aid.
As a bevy of military, governmental and independent organizations scattered across the country repairing schools, opening police stations and planning repairs to local utilities, the effort had a decidedly improvisatory feel. The banking system had collapsed and there was no easy way to pay Iraqi workers and contractors, who were already doing much of the actual labor.
In one nightmarish — but not atypical — transaction, a duffel bag packed with nearly $150,000 in $1, $5 and $10 United States bills sat on the floor among two dozen Iraqis and a handful of American officials in an unbearably hot room thick with cigarette smoke north of Baghdad. The rattle of AK-47's could be heard outside, where mourners at a Shiite funeral were firing into the air. An Iraqi scribbled a hand receipt for the money and the Americans left.
In Iraq, that scene "seemed normal," said Maj. Pete Veale, an Air Force reservist who was attached to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, since replaced by the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator in Iraq.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which was also active on the ground and would eventually pour some $1.4 billion dollars into the infrastructure programs — not including hundreds of millions of dollars spent on fixing oil refineries and pipelines — took a page from its experience in responding to disasters like hurricanes and floods in the United States, said Maj. Gen. Carl A. Strock, director of civil works for the Army Corps. Engineers scattered with their own bags of cash and orders to fix problems as they found them.
The biggest surprise, General Strock said, was "the horrific state of infrastructure that we found on the ground."
Amazingly, Iraqis had kept fragments of it going through what General Strock called a mastery of "sticks-and-strings engineering."
The Sorry State of Things
As widely reported, the rebuilding program quickly turned out to be more costly, more complicated and slower than initially expected, in part because most of the infrastructure problems predate the war. The Bush administration's reports of successes — refurbished schools here, restored telephone service there — have proved difficult to verify and measure, largely because, with so many companies and agencies acting semi-autonomously, there has been no centralized way to track accomplishments. And international criticism of what is perceived as the plodding pace of reconstruction has led to frustration inside Iraq.
"We cannot talk about this without revisiting the history and the heritage that we took over, which was three decades of total neglect of public service," said Nesreen M. Siddeek Berwari, the Iraqi minister of municipalities and public works. "That's where I think the unfortunate misperception is."
The level of dilapidation, grossly intensified by postconflict looting and sabotage, was immense.
An initial $160 million effort to repair Iraq's almost completely dysfunctional sewage plants and water systems is still several months from having an impact on ordinary Iraqis, said Tom Wheelock, director of Iraq infrastructure programs for the United States Agency for International Development.
The first replacements for a dozen telephone switching stations in Baghdad, which were reduced to rubble by coalition forces, should begin working in January, he said, with all expected to be ready by the end of March. The lynchpin of the entire effort — the electrical power grid — is roughly up to its peak prewar output but is subject to cutoffs because of looting, sabotage and its general rickety state.
"There's a lot going on that's not manifest now," Mr. Wheelock said. "We're on the cusp of impacts to people's quality of life."
Sabotage and Improvisation
In many cases, no amount of inspired tinkering had a chance. By August, some 635 towers carrying major lines in Iraq's power distribution grid had been sabotaged, looted or otherwise damaged. In most cases, the steel of the towers and the copper wire running between them had simply disappeared. The computerized systems that matched electrical loads to supplies — crucial for preventing catastrophic overloads — had been stripped clean from nearly all the control centers, and managers were communicating with overland couriers.
"It's like Pony Express," said Cliff Mumm, the project manager in Iraq for Bechtel, which has a $1.03 billion contract with A.I.D. to repair power, water, telecommunications and other systems.
Contractors and military officials quickly secured the authority to issue satellite phones to plant managers so they could communicate with each other, and began shipping into Iraq the chemicals needed to produce the purified water needed to run boilers at the large power plants.
American officials also began installing new electricity generators at some of the large power plants and important users of the power, like hospitals, clinics and refineries. As repairs of the power plants themselves geared up, engineers with the Army Corps, Bechtel and the Iraqi electricity ministry also began working on a dual system of transmission lines that travels from plants in the south toward power-hungry Baghdad. One electrical path runs up the eastern edge of the fertile crescent, one to the west. More than 100 towers on each path had been stripped, and so far only a line with a modest capacity on the western side is operating, Mr. Wheelock said.
Still, the country as a whole is now producing nearly as much power as the 4,400 megawatts it did during peak summer demand before the war, according to A.I.D. figures. By next spring or early summer, said Dean Hagerty, Bechtel's power program manager in Iraq, new turbine generators should be pumping another 440 megawatts into the system. And overall — when a wide variety of other programs to carry out repairs and bring in new generators are accounted for — nearly 4,000 megawatts of additional electricity are possible in 2004, the aid agency says.
In fact, as Iraqi industry comes back and consumers start buying appliances like air conditioners and refrigerators, peak demand is estimated to rise as high as 13,000 megawatts within five to eight years, Mr. Mumm said. One gauge of progress on the industrial side, he said, will probably be "hollering and yelling" when power demands do not meet capacity.
Perhaps the most monumental task of all will be repairing sewage treatment and water purification facilities, which are almost grotesquely out of order. In Baghdad, for instance, some 200 million gallons of wastewater a day were simply shunted into the Tigris, with "not one drop being treated," said John Kluesener, another Bechtel project manager.
That unsanitary load flows south and is tapped by an artificial waterway that is named — in a bizarre twist — the Sweet Water Canal, the source of drinking water for the major city of Basra. To improve that disgusting — and dangerous — state of affairs, the Baghdad plants are being refurbished; the reservoirs fed by the canal are being dredged; and the sprawling water purification system in Basra inspected and repaired.
Mr. Wheelock said he hoped that by early summer, Iraqis would see these projects lifting their sanitary standards far beyond what they experienced under Mr. Hussein.
The Terror Wild Card
Whether that or any other rebuilding timeline proves overly optimistic might be less important than the continued participation of Iraqis in the effort. In its own quiet way, it offsets the image of violence and mayhem that has largely governed how the world has seen postwar Iraq.
"Every time I look around I see Iraqis doing things," said Ms. Berwari, the minister of municipalities and public works. "We think that that same expertise that exists will be the backbone of any success on the reconstruction of this country in the future."
Indeed, one thing those who are involved in the reconstruction say they are sure of is that continuing violence in Iraq will not ultimately hamper the effort. "We have regional offices; they're not experiencing any of the kinds of instability that we're seeing in the greater Baghdad area," said Andrew S. Natsios, the administrator of A.I.D., who said isolated security problems would not pose a problem.
But at least one experience in rebuilding a ravaged country may cast doubt on that assertion. The model that many have in mind is Lebanon, where by the early 1990's civil war had left the country with little electric power, few functioning sanitation facilities, a profoundly unreliable phone system and a downtown in Beirut filled with smashed buildings. Even the traffic lights had been stolen by looters, said Adib Farha, a former adviser to Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.
Mr. Farha recalled that by the end of 1992 or so, there was little fighting or looting in Lebanon, and a large and educated expatriate population returned to help rebuild the country — including Mr. Farha, who was living in Saudi Arabia.
Drastic improvements were evident by 1996 or 1997, he said, and without a similar ebb in the violence in Iraq, it is doubtful that the same migration will take place. And as Iraqi politicians and police officers become targets for terrorists bent on preventing cooperation with the Americans, Iraqi engineers and workers could become discouraged from making themselves vulnerable.
"Now, the minimal safety that's required by anyone to want to live there is nonexistent," Mr. Farha said. "On the contrary, we see that deteriorating every day."
And without security, he said, not even plumbing will save Iraq from chaos.
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