- Aug 23, 2003
- 25,375
- 142
- 116
Updated
By STEVEN R. HURST, Associated Press Writer
Iraq's power grid is on the brink of collapse because of insurgent sabotage, rising demand, fuel shortages and provinces that are unplugging local power stations from the national grid, officials said Saturday.
Electricity Ministry spokesman Aziz al-Shimari said power generation nationally is only meeting half the demand, and there had been four nationwide blackouts over the past two days. The shortages across the country are the worst since the summer of 2003, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, he said.
Power supplies in Baghdad have been sporadic all summer and now are down to just a few hours a day, if that. The water supply in the capital has also been severely curtailed by power blackouts and cuts that have affected pumping and filtration stations.
Karbala province south of Baghdad has been without power for three days, causing water mains to go dry in the provincial capital, the Shiite holy city of Karbala.
"We no longer need television documentaries about the Stone Age. We are actually living in it. We are in constant danger because of the filthy water and rotten food we are having," said Hazim Obeid, who sells clothing at a stall in the Karbala market.
Electricity shortages are a perennial problem in Iraq, even though it sits atop one of the world's largest crude oil reserves. The national power grid became decrepit under Saddam Hussein because his regime was under U.N. sanctions after the Gulf War and had trouble buying spare parts or equipment to upgrade the system.
The power problems are only adding to the misery of Iraqis, already suffering from the effects of more than four years of war and sectarian violence. Outages make life almost unbearable in the summer months, when average daily temperatures reach between 110 and 120 degrees.
One of the biggest problems facing the national grid is the move by provinces to disconnect their power plants from the system, reducing the overall amount of electricity being generated for the entire country. Provinces say they have no choice because they are not getting as much electricity in return for what they produce, mainly because the capital requires so much power.
"Many southern provinces such as Basra, Diwaniyah, Nassiriyah, Babil have disconnected their power plants from the national grid. Northern provinces, including Kurdistan, are doing the same," al-Shimari said. "We have absolutely no control over some areas in the south," he added.
"The national grid will collapse if the provinces do not abide by rules regarding their share of electricity. Everybody will lose and there will be no electricity winner," al-Shimari said.
He complained that the central government was unable to do anything about provincial power stations pulling out of the national system, or the fact some provinces were failing to take themselves off the supply grid once they had consumed their daily ration of electricity.
Najaf provincial spokesman Ahmed Deibel confirmed to The Associated Press Sunday that the gas turbine generator there had been removed from the national grid. He said the plant produced 50 megawatts while the province needed at least 200 megawatts.
"What we produce is not enough even for us. We disconnected it from the national grid three days ago because the people in Baghdad were getting too much, leaving little electricity for Najaf," he said.
Compounding the problem, al-Shimari said there are 17 high-tension lines running into Baghdad but only two were operational. The rest had been sabotaged.
"What makes Baghdad the worst place in the country is that most of the lines leading into the capital have been destroyed. That is compounded by the fact that Baghdad has limited generating capacity," al-Shimari said.
"When we fix a line, the insurgents attack it the next day," he added.
Fuel shortages are also a major problem. In Karbala, provincial spokesman Ghalib al-Daami said a 50-megawatt power station had been shut down because of a lack of fuel, causing the entire province to be without water and electricity for the past three days.
He said sewage was seeping above ground in nearly half the provincial capital because pump trucks used to clean septic tanks have been unable to operate due to gasoline shortages. The sewage was causing a health threat to citizens and contaminating crops in the region.
Many people who normally would rely on small home generators for electricity can't afford to buy fuel. Gasoline prices have shot up to nearly $5 a gallon, Karbala residents say, a price that puts the fuel out of range for all but the wealthy.
"We wait for the sunset to enjoy some coolness," said Qassim Hussein, a 31-year-old day laborer in Karbala. "The people are fed-up. There is no water, no electricity, there is nothing, but death. I've even had more trouble with my wife these last three days. Everybody is on edge."
Iraq has the world's third-largest proven oil reserves, behind Saudi Arabia and Iran. But oil production has been hampered by insurgent and saboteur attacks, ranging from bombing pipelines to siphoning off oil. The attacks have cost the country billions of dollars since the 2003 U.S. invasion. Dilapidated infrastructure has also hindered refining, forcing Iraq to import large amounts of kerosene and other oil products.
The electricity problems come as leaders are trying to deal with a political crisis that erupted when the country's largest bloc of Sunni political parties withdrew from the government.
President Bush called Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Vice President Adel Abdel-Mahdi to urge them to try to preserve political unity in the country, where the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is under a stiff challenge from rival political forces and insurgents.
Talabani, a Kurd, and Abdel-Mahdi, a Shiite, provided few details of the conversations in statements released by their offices. But both men have been involved in trying to solve the crisis.
Elsewhere, the U.S. military announced the death of a Marine during combat Thursday in Iraq's western Anbar province.
The U.S. military also issued a statement saying its forces killed four suspects and captured 33 others Saturday in raids in northern Iraq and along the Tigris River Valley.
In northern Iraq, a prison riot was brought under control two days after it broke out when Iraqi guards prepared to move inmates into an isolation unit and U.S. soldiers surrounded the facility.
The riot at Badoosh prison outside Mosul, about 220 miles northwest of Baghdad, involved nearly 65 inmates. Iraqi guards killed one inmate who was trying to escape from the prison yard and wounded two others inside the prison, the U.S. military said in a statement.
The U.S. military said American troops did not fire any rounds during the disturbance and no U.S. or Iraqi troops were wounded.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Looks like the situation is much worse than I initially suspected, with provinces and cities across Iraq out of power and out of clean running water. Fuel prices are well out of the reach of regular Iraqis (hell, it's double the price it is here), and the unbearable summer weather is driving Iraqis to the edge of reason.
Troop surges and offensives be damned. Providing electricity and water to Iraqis should be the number one goal of our personnel and $10 billion monthly spending in Iraq. It's already a war zone over there, and it can only get worse when the populace is deprived of the everyday things they need to survive.
The Iraqi from Karbala summed up the current situation perfectly:
Text
By STEVEN R. HURST, Associated Press Writer
Much of the Iraqi capital was without running water Thursday and had been for at least 24 hours, compounding the urban misery in a war zone and the blistering heat at the height of the Baghdad summer.
Residents and city officials said large sections in the west of the capital had been virtually dry for six days because the already strained electricity grid cannot provide sufficient power to run water purification and pumping stations.
Baghdad routinely suffers from periodic water outages, but this one is described by residents as one of the most extended and widespread in recent memory. The problem highlights the larger difficulties in a capital beset by violence, crumbling infrastructure, rampant crime and too little electricity to keep cool in the sweltering weather more than four years after the U.S.-led invasion.
Jamil Hussein, a 52-year-old retired army officer who lives in northeast Baghdad, said his house has been without water for two weeks, except for two hours at night. He says the water that does flow smells and is unclean.
Two of his children have severe diarrhea that the doctor attributed to drinking what tap water was available, even after it was boiled.
"We'll have to continue drinking it, because we don't have money to buy bottled water," he said.
Adel al-Ardawi, a spokesman for the Baghdad city government, said that even with sufficient electricity "it would take 24 hours for the water mains to refill so we can begin pumping to residents. And even then the water won't be clean for a time. We just don't have the electricity or fuel for our generators to keep the system flowing."
Noah Miller, spokesman for the U.S. reconstruction program in Baghdad, said that water treatment plants were working "as far as we know."
"It could be a host of issues. ... And one of those may be leaky trunk lines. If there's not enough pressure to cancel out that leakage, that's when the water could fail to reach the household," Miller said.
He said that there had been a nationwide power blackout for a few hours Wednesday night that might be causing problems for all systems that depend on Iraq's already creaking electricity grid.
He blamed the outages on provinces north of Baghdad and in Basra in the far south where officials failed to cutback as required when they had taken their daily ration of electricity.
"It takes a long time to bring the power back up (to the grid's capacity and demand)," Miller said.
In the meantime, Iraqis suffer in brutal heat. It was 117 degrees in the capital Thursday, down from 120 the day before. With the power out or crackling through the decrepit system just a few hours each day, even those who can afford air conditioning do not have the power to run it.
Many Baghdad residents have banded together to use power from neighborhood generators, but the cost of fuel and therefore electricity is skyrocketing. Diesel fuel was going for nearly $4 a gallon on Thursday.
As expected in the midst of a water shortage, the cost of purified bottled water has shot up 33 percent. A 10-liter bottle now costs $1.60.
"For us, we can buy bottled water. But I'm thinking about the poor who cannot afford to buy clean water," said Um Zainab, a 44-year-old homemaker in eastern Baghdad. "This shows the weakness and the inefficiency of government officials who are good at only one thing ? blaming each other for the problems we are face."
The pace of the mayhem that saw 142 killed or found dead nationwide on Wednesday tapered off Thursday, but a suicide car bomber slammed into an Iraqi police station northeast of Baghdad and killed at least 13 people, police said.
Most of the dead were policemen and recruits lining up outside the station in Hibhib, the same small Sunni town near Baqouba where al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike more than a year ago. The area is considered a stronghold of both al-Qaida-linked militants and Saddam Hussein loyalists.
Fifteen were wounded in the attack, a police officer said on condition of anonymity out of security concerns.
A total of 58 people were killed or found dead across the country Thursday, according to police and hospital and morgue officials.
The U.S. military announced three more soldier deaths: two killed in a mortar or rocket attack Tuesday, and another killed in a roadside bombing Wednesday. At least 3,659 U.S. military personnel have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday he is more optimistic about improvements in Iraqi security than he is about getting legislation passed by the bitterly divided government.
"In some ways we probably all underestimated the depth of the mistrust and how difficult it would be for these guys to come together on legislation," Gates said.
His remarks came as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa Party asked the country's largest Sunni Arab bloc to reconsider its withdrawal from government to save Iraq's national unity government.
All six Cabinet ministers from the Iraqi Accordance Front quit al-Maliki's Cabinet a day earlier to protest what they called the prime minister's failure to respond to a set of demands.
Among them were the release of security detainees not charged with specific crimes, the disbanding of militias and the participation of all groups represented in the government in dealing with security issues.
Washington has been pushing al-Maliki's government to pass key laws, including measures to share national oil revenues and incorporate some ousted Baathists into mainstream politics. But the Sunni ministers' resignation from the Cabinet ? not the parliament ? foreshadows even greater difficulty in building consensus when lawmakers return after a monthlong summer recess on Sept. 4.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Apparently we did such a good job of destroying Iraq's infrastructure in 2003's "shock and awe" that we can't bring it up to par four years later. Either that or our military/contractors are completely incompetent. Or perhaps bringing Iraqis the "everyday" things they need to function (like water and electricity) come in second place to troop surges and oil pipelines. If a major US city the size of Baghdad was without clean running water and electricity during 120 degree weather, it would be a national emergency; it would be true suffering for people young and old.
By STEVEN R. HURST, Associated Press Writer
Iraq's power grid is on the brink of collapse because of insurgent sabotage, rising demand, fuel shortages and provinces that are unplugging local power stations from the national grid, officials said Saturday.
Electricity Ministry spokesman Aziz al-Shimari said power generation nationally is only meeting half the demand, and there had been four nationwide blackouts over the past two days. The shortages across the country are the worst since the summer of 2003, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, he said.
Power supplies in Baghdad have been sporadic all summer and now are down to just a few hours a day, if that. The water supply in the capital has also been severely curtailed by power blackouts and cuts that have affected pumping and filtration stations.
Karbala province south of Baghdad has been without power for three days, causing water mains to go dry in the provincial capital, the Shiite holy city of Karbala.
"We no longer need television documentaries about the Stone Age. We are actually living in it. We are in constant danger because of the filthy water and rotten food we are having," said Hazim Obeid, who sells clothing at a stall in the Karbala market.
Electricity shortages are a perennial problem in Iraq, even though it sits atop one of the world's largest crude oil reserves. The national power grid became decrepit under Saddam Hussein because his regime was under U.N. sanctions after the Gulf War and had trouble buying spare parts or equipment to upgrade the system.
The power problems are only adding to the misery of Iraqis, already suffering from the effects of more than four years of war and sectarian violence. Outages make life almost unbearable in the summer months, when average daily temperatures reach between 110 and 120 degrees.
One of the biggest problems facing the national grid is the move by provinces to disconnect their power plants from the system, reducing the overall amount of electricity being generated for the entire country. Provinces say they have no choice because they are not getting as much electricity in return for what they produce, mainly because the capital requires so much power.
"Many southern provinces such as Basra, Diwaniyah, Nassiriyah, Babil have disconnected their power plants from the national grid. Northern provinces, including Kurdistan, are doing the same," al-Shimari said. "We have absolutely no control over some areas in the south," he added.
"The national grid will collapse if the provinces do not abide by rules regarding their share of electricity. Everybody will lose and there will be no electricity winner," al-Shimari said.
He complained that the central government was unable to do anything about provincial power stations pulling out of the national system, or the fact some provinces were failing to take themselves off the supply grid once they had consumed their daily ration of electricity.
Najaf provincial spokesman Ahmed Deibel confirmed to The Associated Press Sunday that the gas turbine generator there had been removed from the national grid. He said the plant produced 50 megawatts while the province needed at least 200 megawatts.
"What we produce is not enough even for us. We disconnected it from the national grid three days ago because the people in Baghdad were getting too much, leaving little electricity for Najaf," he said.
Compounding the problem, al-Shimari said there are 17 high-tension lines running into Baghdad but only two were operational. The rest had been sabotaged.
"What makes Baghdad the worst place in the country is that most of the lines leading into the capital have been destroyed. That is compounded by the fact that Baghdad has limited generating capacity," al-Shimari said.
"When we fix a line, the insurgents attack it the next day," he added.
Fuel shortages are also a major problem. In Karbala, provincial spokesman Ghalib al-Daami said a 50-megawatt power station had been shut down because of a lack of fuel, causing the entire province to be without water and electricity for the past three days.
He said sewage was seeping above ground in nearly half the provincial capital because pump trucks used to clean septic tanks have been unable to operate due to gasoline shortages. The sewage was causing a health threat to citizens and contaminating crops in the region.
Many people who normally would rely on small home generators for electricity can't afford to buy fuel. Gasoline prices have shot up to nearly $5 a gallon, Karbala residents say, a price that puts the fuel out of range for all but the wealthy.
"We wait for the sunset to enjoy some coolness," said Qassim Hussein, a 31-year-old day laborer in Karbala. "The people are fed-up. There is no water, no electricity, there is nothing, but death. I've even had more trouble with my wife these last three days. Everybody is on edge."
Iraq has the world's third-largest proven oil reserves, behind Saudi Arabia and Iran. But oil production has been hampered by insurgent and saboteur attacks, ranging from bombing pipelines to siphoning off oil. The attacks have cost the country billions of dollars since the 2003 U.S. invasion. Dilapidated infrastructure has also hindered refining, forcing Iraq to import large amounts of kerosene and other oil products.
The electricity problems come as leaders are trying to deal with a political crisis that erupted when the country's largest bloc of Sunni political parties withdrew from the government.
President Bush called Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Vice President Adel Abdel-Mahdi to urge them to try to preserve political unity in the country, where the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is under a stiff challenge from rival political forces and insurgents.
Talabani, a Kurd, and Abdel-Mahdi, a Shiite, provided few details of the conversations in statements released by their offices. But both men have been involved in trying to solve the crisis.
Elsewhere, the U.S. military announced the death of a Marine during combat Thursday in Iraq's western Anbar province.
The U.S. military also issued a statement saying its forces killed four suspects and captured 33 others Saturday in raids in northern Iraq and along the Tigris River Valley.
In northern Iraq, a prison riot was brought under control two days after it broke out when Iraqi guards prepared to move inmates into an isolation unit and U.S. soldiers surrounded the facility.
The riot at Badoosh prison outside Mosul, about 220 miles northwest of Baghdad, involved nearly 65 inmates. Iraqi guards killed one inmate who was trying to escape from the prison yard and wounded two others inside the prison, the U.S. military said in a statement.
The U.S. military said American troops did not fire any rounds during the disturbance and no U.S. or Iraqi troops were wounded.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Looks like the situation is much worse than I initially suspected, with provinces and cities across Iraq out of power and out of clean running water. Fuel prices are well out of the reach of regular Iraqis (hell, it's double the price it is here), and the unbearable summer weather is driving Iraqis to the edge of reason.
Troop surges and offensives be damned. Providing electricity and water to Iraqis should be the number one goal of our personnel and $10 billion monthly spending in Iraq. It's already a war zone over there, and it can only get worse when the populace is deprived of the everyday things they need to survive.
The Iraqi from Karbala summed up the current situation perfectly:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Text
By STEVEN R. HURST, Associated Press Writer
Much of the Iraqi capital was without running water Thursday and had been for at least 24 hours, compounding the urban misery in a war zone and the blistering heat at the height of the Baghdad summer.
Residents and city officials said large sections in the west of the capital had been virtually dry for six days because the already strained electricity grid cannot provide sufficient power to run water purification and pumping stations.
Baghdad routinely suffers from periodic water outages, but this one is described by residents as one of the most extended and widespread in recent memory. The problem highlights the larger difficulties in a capital beset by violence, crumbling infrastructure, rampant crime and too little electricity to keep cool in the sweltering weather more than four years after the U.S.-led invasion.
Jamil Hussein, a 52-year-old retired army officer who lives in northeast Baghdad, said his house has been without water for two weeks, except for two hours at night. He says the water that does flow smells and is unclean.
Two of his children have severe diarrhea that the doctor attributed to drinking what tap water was available, even after it was boiled.
"We'll have to continue drinking it, because we don't have money to buy bottled water," he said.
Adel al-Ardawi, a spokesman for the Baghdad city government, said that even with sufficient electricity "it would take 24 hours for the water mains to refill so we can begin pumping to residents. And even then the water won't be clean for a time. We just don't have the electricity or fuel for our generators to keep the system flowing."
Noah Miller, spokesman for the U.S. reconstruction program in Baghdad, said that water treatment plants were working "as far as we know."
"It could be a host of issues. ... And one of those may be leaky trunk lines. If there's not enough pressure to cancel out that leakage, that's when the water could fail to reach the household," Miller said.
He said that there had been a nationwide power blackout for a few hours Wednesday night that might be causing problems for all systems that depend on Iraq's already creaking electricity grid.
He blamed the outages on provinces north of Baghdad and in Basra in the far south where officials failed to cutback as required when they had taken their daily ration of electricity.
"It takes a long time to bring the power back up (to the grid's capacity and demand)," Miller said.
In the meantime, Iraqis suffer in brutal heat. It was 117 degrees in the capital Thursday, down from 120 the day before. With the power out or crackling through the decrepit system just a few hours each day, even those who can afford air conditioning do not have the power to run it.
Many Baghdad residents have banded together to use power from neighborhood generators, but the cost of fuel and therefore electricity is skyrocketing. Diesel fuel was going for nearly $4 a gallon on Thursday.
As expected in the midst of a water shortage, the cost of purified bottled water has shot up 33 percent. A 10-liter bottle now costs $1.60.
"For us, we can buy bottled water. But I'm thinking about the poor who cannot afford to buy clean water," said Um Zainab, a 44-year-old homemaker in eastern Baghdad. "This shows the weakness and the inefficiency of government officials who are good at only one thing ? blaming each other for the problems we are face."
The pace of the mayhem that saw 142 killed or found dead nationwide on Wednesday tapered off Thursday, but a suicide car bomber slammed into an Iraqi police station northeast of Baghdad and killed at least 13 people, police said.
Most of the dead were policemen and recruits lining up outside the station in Hibhib, the same small Sunni town near Baqouba where al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike more than a year ago. The area is considered a stronghold of both al-Qaida-linked militants and Saddam Hussein loyalists.
Fifteen were wounded in the attack, a police officer said on condition of anonymity out of security concerns.
A total of 58 people were killed or found dead across the country Thursday, according to police and hospital and morgue officials.
The U.S. military announced three more soldier deaths: two killed in a mortar or rocket attack Tuesday, and another killed in a roadside bombing Wednesday. At least 3,659 U.S. military personnel have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday he is more optimistic about improvements in Iraqi security than he is about getting legislation passed by the bitterly divided government.
"In some ways we probably all underestimated the depth of the mistrust and how difficult it would be for these guys to come together on legislation," Gates said.
His remarks came as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa Party asked the country's largest Sunni Arab bloc to reconsider its withdrawal from government to save Iraq's national unity government.
All six Cabinet ministers from the Iraqi Accordance Front quit al-Maliki's Cabinet a day earlier to protest what they called the prime minister's failure to respond to a set of demands.
Among them were the release of security detainees not charged with specific crimes, the disbanding of militias and the participation of all groups represented in the government in dealing with security issues.
Washington has been pushing al-Maliki's government to pass key laws, including measures to share national oil revenues and incorporate some ousted Baathists into mainstream politics. But the Sunni ministers' resignation from the Cabinet ? not the parliament ? foreshadows even greater difficulty in building consensus when lawmakers return after a monthlong summer recess on Sept. 4.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Apparently we did such a good job of destroying Iraq's infrastructure in 2003's "shock and awe" that we can't bring it up to par four years later. Either that or our military/contractors are completely incompetent. Or perhaps bringing Iraqis the "everyday" things they need to function (like water and electricity) come in second place to troop surges and oil pipelines. If a major US city the size of Baghdad was without clean running water and electricity during 120 degree weather, it would be a national emergency; it would be true suffering for people young and old.
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