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The Associated Press
August 3, 2007
BAGHDAD 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.
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 bad 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 cut back 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.
There is no excuse for this shit after 4 goddam years. Halliburton has fucked us all. No wonder they hate us.
If I had oil in my backyard, I wouldn't expect diesel fuel to be $4 a gallon.
Imagine the living conditions with contaminated water and bottled water too expensive for most of the city, let alone the rest of the country where reporters fear to tread.
Price gouging exists even where it shouldn't. So the capitalism experiment is as failed as the democracy experiment in Iraq.
And for those of you that only blame the insurgents for all of this;
If the water and electricity cannot be protected from the thugs, how the hell do you expect me to believe you can run them out of the country entirely with what amounts to a skeleton crew of armed forces?
4 + Years and counting....No fucking progress. It's as if they were still trying to decide what to do next.
Think for a minute.
Let's say Canada had a ruthless bunch of survivalist militia types operating inside the old USSR and launched a terrorist attack on Moscow and Leningrad. The Soviets decide to attack the safehavens inside Canada and destroy the entity that attacked them as well as whoever gave quarter to them.
Then, The Soviets, believing the US was part of the problem, invaded the lower 48 and occupied it, even though we had NOTHING to do with it.
What would you do, America?
August 3, 2007
BAGHDAD 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.
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 bad 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 cut back 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.
There is no excuse for this shit after 4 goddam years. Halliburton has fucked us all. No wonder they hate us.
If I had oil in my backyard, I wouldn't expect diesel fuel to be $4 a gallon.
Imagine the living conditions with contaminated water and bottled water too expensive for most of the city, let alone the rest of the country where reporters fear to tread.
Price gouging exists even where it shouldn't. So the capitalism experiment is as failed as the democracy experiment in Iraq.
And for those of you that only blame the insurgents for all of this;
If the water and electricity cannot be protected from the thugs, how the hell do you expect me to believe you can run them out of the country entirely with what amounts to a skeleton crew of armed forces?
4 + Years and counting....No fucking progress. It's as if they were still trying to decide what to do next.
Think for a minute.
Let's say Canada had a ruthless bunch of survivalist militia types operating inside the old USSR and launched a terrorist attack on Moscow and Leningrad. The Soviets decide to attack the safehavens inside Canada and destroy the entity that attacked them as well as whoever gave quarter to them.
Then, The Soviets, believing the US was part of the problem, invaded the lower 48 and occupied it, even though we had NOTHING to do with it.
What would you do, America?
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