* Iraq: A country in shambles
Baghdad, Iraq – As a daily drum beat of violence continues to reverberate across Iraq, people here continue to struggle to find some sense of normality, a task made increasingly difficult due to ongoing violence and the lack of both water and electricity.
During the build-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration promised the war would bring Iraqis a better life, and vast improvements in their infrastructure, which had been severely debilitated by nearly 13 years of strangling economic sanctions.
More jobs, improved water availability, better electricity, and major rehabilitation of the medical infrastructure were promised.
But now that the US military has ended its formal military occupation of Iraq, nearly eight years of war has left the promises as little more than a mirage.
Ongoing water shortages
Hashim Hassan is the Deputy Director of the Baghdad Water Authority (BWA), and he admits to an ongoing shortage of clean drinking water for Baghdad’s seven million residents.
“We produce 2.5 million cubic litres daily, so there is a shortage of 1m cubic litres every day,” Hassan explained to Al Jazeera. “We’ve added projects to increase water availability, and we are hoping to stop the ongoing shortage by the end of 2012.”
According to Hassan, 80 per cent of the Baghdad’s piping network needs rehabilitation – work currently underway – in addition to positioning 100 compact units around the city, which would increase clean water availability until larger plants can come fully online.
Several water treatment plants are already being extended, including one that would increase the capacity of a wastewater treatment facility in Sadr City, a sprawling slum of roughly three million people.
Follow in-depth coverage of the nation in flux Hassan said that health committees and the Ministry of Environment carry out tests, and along with BWA testing, 1,000 water samples are checked daily, “less than one per cent of the samples fail” he said. The “acceptable threshold” is five per cent.
Bechtel, a multi-billion dollar US-based global engineering and construction company – whose board members have close ties to the former Bush administration – received $2.3bn of Iraqi reconstruction funds and US taxpayer money, but left the country without completing many of the tasks it set out to.
Bechtel’s contract for Iraq had included reconstruction of water treatment systems, electricity plants, sewage systems, airports and roads.
Managers at water departments around Iraq say that the only repairs they managed during the US occupation were through UN offices and humanitarian aid organisations. The ministry provided them with very little chlorine for water treatment. “New projects” were no more than simple maintenance operations that did little to halt collapsing infrastructure.
Bechtel was among the first companies, along with Halliburton (where former US Vice-President Dick Cheney once worked), to have received fixed-fee contracts drawn to guarantee profit.
Ahmed al-Ani who works with a major Iraqi construction contracting company told Al Jazeera the model Bechtel adopted was certain to fail.
“They charged huge sums of money for the contracts they signed, then they sold them to smaller companies who resold them again to small inexperienced Iraqi contractors,” Ani said. “These inexperienced contractors then had to execute the works badly because of the very low prices they get, and the lack of experience.”
According to a March 2011 report by the UN’s Inter-Agency Information and Analysis Unit, one in five Iraqi households use an unsafe source of drinking water, and another 16 per cent report daily supply problems.
The situation is even worse in rural areas, where only 43 per cent have access to safe drinking water, and water available for agriculture is usually scarce and of very poor quality. These facts have led more Iraqis than ever to leave rural communities in search of water and work in the cities, further compounding already existing problems there.
The UN report states: “Quality of water used for drinking and agriculture is poor, violating Iraq National Standards and WHO guidelines. Leaking sewage pipes and septic tanks contaminate the drinking water network with wastewater. 80 per cent of households do not treat water before drinking. Furthermore, just 18 per cent of wastewater is treated, with the rest released directly into waterways.”
And this is exactly what many Iraqis experience first-hand.
The * Iraq: A country in shambles by Dinar Daddy's Tidbits, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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