Inching Along, One More Piece to Rebuild Iraq - The New York Times

Inching Along, One More Piece to Rebuild Iraq The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/world/middleeast/inchingalongonemorepiecetorebuildiraq.html 1/5

MIDDLE EAST | THE REACH OF WAR: RECONSTRUCTION

Inching Along, One More Piece toRebuild IraqBy JAMES GLANZ OCT. 17, 2004

Correction Appended

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 16 Call it the Iraqi version of the tortoise andthe hare.

On a sixday journey this week, more than 500 tons of housesizecomponents on their way to the capital crept across Al Anbar Province, agrimy and murderous border region, at the whiteknuckle pace of 10 to 15miles an hour. Protected by an armada of helicopters, Bradley tanks,Humvees and bulletproof Land Cruisers, the convoy looked like themakings of some kind of space program, but in fact it carried sections of anenormous generator, financed by American taxpayers, to upgrade the Iraqipower grid. In operations like this, Iraq's physical reconstruction inchesforward.

But lined up against the reconstruction effort is the danger that strikeswith seemingly inescapable suddenness all over Iraq: in one recent exampleinvolving a similar convoy, two Jordanian drivers working for the companywhose trucks move the generators were gunned down.

Pressure is increasing on the Bush administration to show that therebuilding effort will win this race, and that some of the many projects thathave been delayed or temporarily abandoned will soon improve the lives ofIraqis, giving them a reason to trust the government and reject the anarchy



of the insurgency.

More than any other sector of the infrastructure, it is the electrical gridthat fills officials with hope. True, virtually every project is behind schedule,and few goals have been met. Indeed, officials involved with reconstructionexpend great effort revising the overly optimistic projections made by theAmerican occupation authorities in previous months. But there are, finally,more megawatts on the grid than before the invasion, and with a number ofbig projects under way behind the scenes, officials say it is just the start.

"We're getting the crisis back under control," said Simon Stolp, theprogram manager for electricity at the Project and Contracting Office,which is managing billions of dollars of Congressionally mandatedreconstruction money. "There are a whole basket of positive things to beseen," he said.

The grid had been deteriorating under the pressure of sanctions andneglect ever since it was put back together after American bombersdestroyed it in 1991, but Mr. Stolp said those problems were quicklybecoming a thing of the past.

"There will be more megawatts on the grid next summer than therehave been at any period of time since the gulf war," Mr. Stolp said.

Iraqi electricity experts are less impressed. Saad Shakir Tawfiq, ascientist who leads Iraqi teams working at several power plants, said he wassurprised that his relatively upscale Baghdad neighborhood was stillsubjected to regular blackouts, two hours off, and four hours on.

"It's the time of year when everybody switches off airconditioners, andnobody uses heaters," Dr. Tawfiq said. "There should be a surplus."

But Mr. Stolp said that Iraqis, with their newfound freedom, werebuying more and more electrical appliances and sapping the network, andeven Dr. Tawfiq conceded that it could take a while for the big generationprojects to get more electricity into the homes of Iraqis.



The 340mile journey the generator convoy took from Jordan, which areporter joined for the final 75 miles, showed how determined theAmericans are to push ahead with big electricity projects.

The mission passed within a few miles of the insurgent strongholds ofRamadi and Falluja before the convoy of 42 vehicles reached Baghdad,snaking its way through the city's edgy streets in the dead of night. Workersclimbed ladders to snip overhead power lines that were in the way,bulldozed obstacles on the ground and fixed a tank that had broken down inthe convoy's path.

Gunshots rang out repeatedly, although most of them came fromAmerican soldiers firing into the air to keep traffic back.

"This is one of those you'llnevergetitdone tasks," said JohnYourston, a former member of the British special forces and now theoperations director in Iraq for Olive Security, a private company thatdirected the journey, from scouting out the route to positioning the tankstraveling in the convoy.

The military's shorthand for the mission was MOAG, for Mother of AllGenerators. "It's a monster, isn't it?" Mr. Yourston said.

The MOAG, along with a giant gas turbine to power it and two otherhuge truckloads of equipment, arrived intact at a south Baghdad powerplant at first light on Wednesday morning, two days before the start ofRamadan.

The generator is one of a pair manufactured by General Electric thatare now set to be installed at the south Baghdad plant as part of a project toadd more than 200 megawatts to the grid. That would more than double thecurrent output of the ancient steam turbines at the plant and contributesubstantially to the roughly 5,000 megawatts that the entire country isproducing at the moment, said Abdul Hassan Qasim, the plant's director.

"What is produced by this turbine," Mr. Qasim said of the latestdelivery, "is essential to Baghdad, because it is in the heart of Baghdad."



So the juice will go right to powerstarved consumers without beingdissipated in long transmission lines, he said. David DeVoss, a spokesmanfor the United States Agency for International Development, which isadministering the financing, said the estimated cost for the project was$162 million. Bechtel, the international engineering and construction giant,manages the work for the agency.

Originally scheduled to be producing electricity by December, thegenerators are not expected to be ready until June. The pace slowed andsecurity costs soared after the insurgency broke out across the country inApril. Two months later, three General Electric employees were killed by asuicide bomber while riding in a convoy in Baghdad.

Now the work site, which employs some 260 Iraqis, resembles FortKnox, as one Bechtel employee put it. (Fearing reprisals, the company askedthat none of its employees be named, and that no photographs showinglandmarks around the compound be taken.) The site is surrounded by highconcrete blast walls, and there is a bunkerlike inner perimeter where projectmanagers work.

Whenever a Westerner ventures from the inner perimeter and mingleswith the Iraqi workers, he is accompanied by rifletoting guards fromArmorGroup, another private security company. In addition, the site isprotected by about 80 of the Nepalese guards known as Ghurkas. There areguard towers, checkpoints and sandbagged refuges for protection in case ofa mortar attack.

Like the Western managers and engineers, all of the security personnelmust be fed and housed at the site. "Security threw this project all out ofwhack," said a Bechtel official working inside the compound. "There's notelling what it's going to cost." He cautioned, however, that not all of thecost increases could be attributed to security. Officials involved with thereconstruction say they are in negotiations with General Electric over costincreases.

Mr. DeVoss said he had no information on how much of the contract



would be eaten up by security, but other officials say the proportion has

risen to 30 percent and higher on similar projects.

Still, it seems unlikely that an exact reckoning of security costs for theMOAG will ever be made. At various times the convoy was protected by theArmy's First Cavalry Division; the Second Battalion, 11th Marine Regiment;and at least three other military units. Capt. Charley Von Bergen of theMarines guessed that 500 soldiers had been involved in one way or another,but he conceded that there was no solid estimate. Through it all, the MOAGkept rolling along, stenciled along its bottom edge with the word "fragile"and the universal sign for equipment that is easily damaged a wineglass.

THE REACH OF WAR: RECONSTRUCTION Correction: October 22,2004, Friday A graph on Oct. 17 with an article about struggles to rebuildIraq's electrical grid carried a mislabeled timeline. While the supply ofcurrent since the March 2003 invasion was depicted correctly, the letter"O," for a month between November and December 2003, was insertederroneously. With that letter deleted, the remaining month abbreviationsshould have been spaced evenly across the bottom.

Inching Along, One More Piece to Rebuild Iraq - The New York Times

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