U.S. Rebuilding Iraq: "But who else is going to do this?"

Forbes Magazine ^ | June 23, 2003 Issue | Nathan Vardi

[yankeedame]

Desert Storm

Nathan Vardi
06.23.03

Bechtel Group is leading the charge to rebuild Iraq. Why is it taking so long to show results?

...Like many senior Iraqi directors, (Hashem) Maoula speaks broken English.... Maoula may be relieved to see the last of the dictator, but he is still bitter.... He and his 60 workers haven't been paid in more than a month. Recently someone stole his company car.

Maoula leads the Bechtel (Group) engineers into his dilapidated office; his phone doesn't work....(They) discuss the condition of the 30-year-old power plant... A cooling system on the fritz means that each of the two generators is running at 50% of its 24-megawatt capacity. Maoula seems skeptical there will ever be improvements.

As well he might.

Patching up Iraq has been slower and more difficult than anyone imagined. San Francisco-based Bechtel got the green light early on ...and it has 100 senior managers in Iraq working 14-hour days, seven days a week. But many cities are still without running water, and the country with the second-largest oil reserves in the world is importing gasoline.

Neither problem will see relief until Iraq's electrical grid is repaired. The grid can't be repaired with all the pillaging and sabotage going on.

"If you get the rags of civilization back in place, like water and electricity, then people will realize it isn't okay to loot," says Cliff G. Mumm, Bechtel's Iraq project chief.

Getting those rags in place has been a struggle... fronts. "There is a gap between what is needed and people's expectations of what we can do," admits Thomas Wheelock, the infrastructure team leader in Iraq for the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), which awarded Bechtel's $680 million contract. It is a tiny down payment on the $30 billion to $100 billion needed to rebuild Iraq. But AID...has doled out only 5% of the total--barely enough to get started...

Still, to get anything done, Bechtel has had to be enterprising. Nowhere is that more obvious than in (the port of) Umm Qasr, where most of the $34.6 million AID has disbursed is being put to use to prepare the port to receive food and reconstruction materials.

Here, tempers can run short.

Every day a large group of Iraqis loiters outside the main entrance to the port, holding cardboard boxes to shade their heads, waiting endlessly for a foreman to hire them. British soldiers in uniform gather in front of the makeshift canteen, keeping watch, eating candy bars.

Those Iraqis who have found work at the port got one $20 payment weeks ago; the approval for further funds was held up. Without salaries, they refused to start cleaning the 12-story-high grain silos--a crucial step to receive large amounts of humanitarian aid. Readying those storage tanks will require $8 million for equipment and labor...

The less patient turn to looting, easily sidestepping the shipping containers that were lined up as makeshift security fences, or using acetylene torches to cut through a gate put up by the Army.

The storage rooms near the grain silos have been gutted and left empty, circuit breakers ripped out of electrical boxes, leaving only a few dangling wires. The furniture has all been carted away. Even the exhaust fans from bathrooms--gone.

A similar problem afflicts the power system. Unmanned substations have been hit especially hard. Thieves have taken everything from cable switches and transformer parts to door frames and nuts and bolts.

Bechtel engineers who meet with the Southern Iraq Electricity Co. in Basra each Sunday left a meeting thinking one substation was ready to go fully online, only to return a week later to find it had been completely stripped...

...A big concern is all the unexploded ordnance in the channel, mines left over from as far back as the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Some of the detection and removal is left to divers from Fort Lauderdale-based Titan Maritime who found a 250-pound bomb inside one of the many shipwrecks.

Work is slow along the 525-foot-wide route to Umm Qasr's grain elevator, where the Dredge Carolina chews up the mud with its 3,000 horsepower cutter and suctions out the loosened silt.

Because of sea mines, it will take eight instead of five months to ready the port for 75,000-ton ships. The mouthpiece of the suction machine attached to the Dredge Carolina has been fitted with a grille to keep it from swallowing large munitions, but that means pieces of trash get caught, and someone has to remove debris every three hours.

Dredging to a depth of 41 feet will make way for the 50,000-ton ships carrying food that are slated to reach the port by July. Bechtel hopes to have all work orders for the whole contract in place by mid- August...

While there's still very little juice in Baghdad, in the rest of the country it is better than it was before the war, thanks largely to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and industrious Iraqis; Bechtel still doesn't know when it will restore electricity to the capital. "The job is utterly confusing, and I knew it would be," says Mumm. "But who else is going to do this?"

[Thinkin' Gal]

...Like many senior Iraqi directors, (Hashem)

Rebuilding Babylon ping.