Race to Get Lights On
In Iraq Shows Perils
Of Reconstruction
Despite Stumbles, Attacks,
Corps of Engineers' Team
Is Finally Making Progress
Col. Semonite's Travel Tips
By NEIL KING JR.
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 2, 2004; Page A1
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- When Col. Todd Semonite arrived here last fall to direct a massive push to restore Iraq's electricity grid, his orders were simple: Stress speed over all else.
Hauling in some key generators from overseas proved too slow on ships, so he flew them on cargo planes at several times the cost. He riled Pentagon auditors by allowing his contractors to buy millions of dollars in parts without competitive bids. His haste extended to his armed drivers, who careened along Iraq's clogged highways in sport-utility vehicles at extreme speeds -- both to get around the country faster and to avoid danger.
THE FIGHT FOR IRAQ
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See continuing coverage2 of developments in Iraq.
"The point is to always keep moving," Col. Semonite said on a recent trip north of Baghdad, as he chewed on a grape Tootsie-Pop, his typical lunch. "It is hard to trigger a bomb accurately to hit a Suburban going 100 miles an hour."
Col. Semonite's team is making significant progress in the race to rebuild Iraq's power system before the planned U.S. handover of power to Iraqis in June. But his experience shows how rebuilding Iraq is proving to be a far more dangerous and expensive task than the U.S. and its private contractors expected. That lesson was on gruesome display this week with the killing and mutilation Wednesday of four American contractors.
The U.S. originally tapped the engineering giant Bechtel Group Inc. to restore electricity in Iraq at a time when the military expected a swift victory and the administration foresaw a smooth reconstruction effort funded in large part by Iraqi oil revenue. Bechtel, like others, so misjudged the dangers of postwar Iraq that it set aside just $500,000 to hire six security guards, compared with the 169 it has today.
By last summer it was clear that the U.S. plan to rely on one civilian contractor with limited funding was not working. Thirteen aging power stations were in various states of disrepair, while looters and saboteurs undermined the system further.
In September, the U.S. sent in Col. Semonite of the Army Corps of Engineers to oversee three additional U.S. contractors armed with almost unlimited muscle and wads of cash -- mostly from Iraqi oil revenue. The group has since installed hundreds of megawatts of new power generation, erected 692 huge transmission towers and strung thousands of miles of high-voltage cable. The Corps' success on the electricity push is one reason the U.S. military, instead of the Agency for International Development, will now guide most of the $14 billion in additional rebuilding work slated for Iraq this year.
But that success has come at a high price. Attacks so far have killed 27 of the Army Corps' subcontractors and security guards, most in roadside ambushes similar to the one that killed the four American security guards in Fallujah on Wednesday. The Corps' work is costing about $900,000 per megawatt of production capacity, while Bechtel's more-deliberate power projects are costing about 30% less. Total spending on the power grid is expected to exceed $5 billion.
Bringing steady power to Iraq's cities is an urgent priority for the Bush administration, as thousands of new appliances pour into the country and factories come on line. For Bechtel, the job began just weeks after Baghdad fell on April 9, when dozens of the company's engineers streamed into Iraq to undertake a range of reconstruction work. It had a broad, $680 million contract from AID, the government agency the Bush administration picked to lead reconstruction.
Bechtel's first two months were devoted to compiling a detailed survey of Iraq's infrastructure, amid tussles with the country's barely functional ministries. Early lists of "vital needs" from the Electricity Ministry included demands for hundreds of Mercedes trucks with compact-disc players. "It was laughable," said Mike Robinson, head of the Bechtel electricity project in Iraq, who arrived in Baghdad May 15.
By late August, with tempers flaring across the country at the slow pace of rebuilding, Bechtel was still debating with the ministry and AID over which electricity projects to tackle. The company had ordered only $2 million in emergency spare parts for the country's dilapidated power stations. "We faced a big problem," said Randy Richardson, head of electricity for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the Pentagon-led organization that functions as Iraq's de facto government.
Bechtel says it stands by its work. "People think we were sent to rebuild all of Iraq," says Cliff Mumm, Bechtel's Iraq project manager. "We weren't. We came with a very small pot of money to do very limited work."
Bechtel's work was also hampered by overlapping bureaucracies within Baghdad. Worsening security and the company's own intense caution also kept many of its engineers hunkered down in Baghdad.
On Aug. 25, Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the Pentagon's Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, convened a two-day summit on Iraq's infrastructure at CentCom headquarters in Tampa, Fla. Iraq's electricity woes posed a serious security concern, the unhappy general told the assembled CPA officials and Army brass.
Gen. Abizaid proposed a new approach. "The idea was to move in as we would after a major disaster and throw money and people at the problem to fix it in a hurry," recalls Major Gen. Carl Strock, a senior Army Corps official who attended the meeting.
The new strategy called for boosting Iraq's power generation to at least 6,000 megawatts by June. That's about as much as Washington and its immediate suburbs consume in a day, but nearly twice the country's output at the time. Bechtel's assigned targets -- 445 megawatts of new power and the same amount in revamping of old plants -- wouldn't even come close to the target.
So the group turned to the Army Corps of Engineers. Col. Semonite, a 45-year-old West Point grad who had just returned to the U.S. from a three-year deployment in Europe, got the nod a week later to be the project's on-the-ground leader. Leaving his wife and four children behind in Virginia outside Washington, he landed in Iraq Sept. 15 with about a dozen men. His Iraq team soon gave a nickname to the former ski racer from Vermont: the Energizer Bunny.
While the Corps' effort was getting under way, U.S. officials decided to make an all-out push at plants around the country to boost production above the prewar level of 4,500 megawatts by Oct. 9, the six-month anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. Iraqis did most of the work with whatever they had on hand.
"We worked like crazy, but it was all too much," said Gazi Aziz, a plant manager at the Baghdad South power station, a huge, decrepit electricity plant on the edge of the capital. A few patches were made, and in early October all of the plant's six generators were revved to capacity for the first time in years. The rickety boilers spat out steam and water. Pipes sprang massive leaks. "It fell apart in five days," said Mr. Aziz.
GETTING WIRED
• Despite dramatic progress, Iraqis will still suffer shortages in the hottest months.
• The Bush administration has hired four prime contractors to oversee a total of more than $5 billion in Iraq power work
• The companies, with dozens of subcontractors, have erected 794 huge 400-kilovolt transmission towers across Iraq and nearly 4,000 miles of high-voltage wire.
• Average power production nationwide this week still met only about 75% of the average demand.
• The biggest power gap is still in Baghdad, which may not have full-time electricity until sometime next year.
Source: U.S. Department of Defense; WSJ research
Still, on Oct. 9, a beaming Paul Bremer, President Bush's top envoy to Iraq, strode into a Baghdad press conference to tick off the accomplishments of the first six months. Topping the list was news that three days earlier, Iraq had produced 4,518 megawatts of power -- just above the country's estimated prewar level.
In reality, electricity production had hit what turned out to be a false peak and was falling fast.
About a mile from where Mr. Bremer made the announcement, Col. Semonite's team had set up shop in a white-marble mansion with a pool in the yard and gold fixtures in the bathrooms -- the former home of Saddam Hussein's spurned first wife.
To do the job, Col. Semonite's Restore Iraqi Electricity task force had $1.05 billion, most of it drawn from Iraqi oil revenue. The Corps also had three U.S. firms ready to go under open-ended contingency contracts signed before the war began. Eleven days after arriving in Baghdad, Col. Semonite issued orders for the companies to tackle 21 electricity assignments across the country, a list that soon jumped to 26.
Washington Group International Inc., a large Idaho-based engineering company, would handle projects in the north; Fluor Corp. of Aliso Viejo, Cal., the region around Baghdad; and Perini Corp. of Framingham, Mass., the southern third of the country.
Bob Spaulding, the wiry leader of Fluor's team in Iraq, said the pace from the start was unprecedented in his 15 years with the company. "We're being told to do work on a schedule that's twice as fast as we'd do it in the U.S.," he said.
Fluor's biggest job, the Qudas power station, lies at the end of a rutted road about 20 miles north of Baghdad. When the first Corps engineers arrived at Qudas on Oct. 18, it had two working Chinese-built power units producing 250 megawatts, or enough to power a town of about 50,000 people. Another two units sat in crates in the Jordanian port of Aqaba, bought in the late 1990s under the United Nations oil-for-food program but never delivered. Two days later, the engineers broke ground to dig foundations for four smaller units to add another 172 megawatts -- a $160 million project. Fluor's team arrived a week later.
The job would need nearly 12,000 tons of concrete, so Fluor had a concrete plant assembled that could churn out 800 tons a day and brought in a fleet of concrete trucks. The Electricity Ministry provided more than 200 Iraqi workers. The company leased five heavy cranes from Kuwait, including a massive 450-ton lifter that took 25 semitrailers to haul in.
Fluor then scoured the globe to find available generators and transformers for the four new units. The company tracked down two generators in Brazil and sent technicians to cut them off their foundations. Four huge transformers were found in Mexico. Fluor marshaled the rest of the heavy equipment from across the U.S. The company leased a ship, gathered all the equipment in Houston, and got it to the plant by early February.
Getting the two oil-for-food units to the site posed another challenge. Each required its own U.S. military-protected convoy stretching 19 trucks long. Conducted under intense secrecy, the two trips each took six days.
"God, is this beautiful," Col. Semonite said, surveying the Qudas site one morning as Iraqi workers scurried amid a welter of cranes and cement mixers.
Fluor and the Army Corps have cut a few corners in the interest of time, he conceded. They poured foundations in a matter of hours without testing the ground conditions. If equipment had to be airlifted in, they did it, without worrying about cost. "But so far, no snags," said Col. Semonite, whose tour of duty in Iraq ended last month.
In all, the Corps has orchestrated 41 airlifts for power supplies, 20 of which used chartered Russian-built Antonovs, the world's biggest cargo planes.
The Corps team, in its haste, has made blunders. Both the General Accounting Office and Pentagon auditors are now evaluating whether the Corps' contractors stayed within federal procurement rules when buying big-ticket items without competitive bidding or obtaining proper documentation for sole-source subcontract awards. Col. Semonite's deputies gave the work final billing approval, despite strong objections from Pentagon auditors. Officials declined to provide additional specifics on the continuing investigations.
One of 68 towers, 200 feet or taller, replaced to reconnect the southern city of Basra to Baghdad.
In Col. Semonite's trip from Qudas site to the Beiji power station in tumultuous northern Iraq the next day, speed would be of the essence. Getting there meant skirting Samara and Tikrit and driving straight through the town of Beiji, among the most dangerous byways in Iraq.
Bundled in a flak jacket and helmet, Col. Semonite traveled in an unarmored Chevrolet Suburban with two machine-gunners in the front seat, another SUV leading, and three more in back. Six of his eight bodyguards were Iraqis with wooden-handled AK-47 assault rifles. Col. Semonite always made a point of leaving on day trips, even long ones, after 9 a.m. or so on the logic that most roadside bombs were detonated in the early hours of the day. The other rule was to avoid stopping at all costs, even if that meant driving up the wrong side of the freeway or cruising along the shoulder of the road to avoid traffic jams.
South of Tikrit, he pointed out where two Korean subcontractors, working for the Washington Group, were gunned down along the road at the end of November. On Jan. 5, two other Corps subcontractors, both French, died in an ambush near Fallujah west of Baghdad. The task force has also lost 23 Iraqi security guards to other attacks.
"It's a horrible loss," Col. Semonite said, gripping his seat as the Suburban, skirting a traffic jam, nearly veered off the road. "But we can't let the dangers slow us down."
Beiji is Iraq's largest power station, tucked against bare mountains in one of the most dangerous areas of the country. Operating out of a ramshackle trailer with 10 Iraqi employees and one computer on site, Bechtel began small-scale work on the belching, 20-year-old plant in January after months of squabbles with Iraq's Electricity Ministry. The $30 million job is dirty and intricate, involving hundreds of spare parts not easily found on the open market.
Adnan Bashir, a former Beiji plant manager who is now head of Bechtel's Iraqi team at the site, said security worries kept Bechtel's own engineers away for months. Difficulties in tracking down needed parts have impeded the work, too. "It's not much," he said, standing in the Bechtel warehouse in front of a few motors and pumps on a shelf and stacks of insulation.
A team of Iraqi welders had just started refurbishing one of the plant's leaking boilers. Another group in greasy overalls was busy taking apart a turbine inside the main plant.
Bechtel officials don't dispute that the Beiji work was slow to get started but insist that the work will be completed on time this summer.
Up a muddy lane a few minutes walk from the plant, the Army team bustled among 28 trailers housing more than 40 workers from Washington Group and five subcontractors. All had arrived since October. Despite the occasional mortar round from across the river, work hooking up eight mobile generators and transformers was well under way. All of the equipment had been airlifted in from abroad on 14 huge cargo jets.
Col. Semonite, though, would like to see more progress. "OK, when are these going to start coming on line? Tomorrow?" he said, tromping through puddles as three Washington Group engineers tagged along.
The engineers exchanged glances and then one of them said, "Eight to 10 days."
"Oh, come on. Faster," Col. Semonite shot back.
Write to Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com3
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