Steve Palmer's battle: clean water for Baghdad

There are many things about life here that have gotten worse since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime six months ago, and Iraqis find them easy to spot: much less electricity, for example, and far more crime.

And then there are things that are almost impossible to see, unless you're a man like Steve Palmer, a water and waste-management engineer. Only then would you know that Baghdad's water is 25 percent more polluted than it was before the war. You would realize that an injection of sewage into the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers makes the flow of water to the south so dirty that long-forgotten diseases are reemerging.

And you would understand that as more people flow into Baghdad in search of reconstruction-related jobs, pressures on the water system will only increase.

Only then might you think it worthwhile to leave your new wife in Manchester, England, to spend a year in Iraq.

"It could've been considered a hazardous job to take, but I saw it as a chance to help put Iraq back together," says Mr. Palmer, a British national who works for Bechtel, the San Francisco-based company that has won the biggest portion of USAID funds for capital construction in Iraq - $1.03 billion.

Palmer's days are filled with the nuts and bolts of repairing and rebuilding electricity stations, bridges, highways, schools, hospitals - and the all-important water and waste treatment plants that virtually ceased to function upon the regime's collapse. He and about 160 Bechtel engineers are charged with the frustrating task of trying to rebuild Iraq amid ongoing violence against coalition forces and regular attacks on public facilities.

The war is the primary reason for the steep decline in water quality. Power was cut in some places and damaged by bombing in others, putting many pumping stations out of order. Desperate Iraqis sometimes shot at water mains to puncture them, dangerously weakening the water pressure and quality for people further down the line.

Looting did some of the most serious damage, and even after electricity substations were repaired, some have been hit again by saboteurs, virtual professionals who knew that things like copper wiring and electrical switching equipment could be resold.

"There was a lot of industrial looting," says Palmer as he makes the rounds of this plant, one of three in Baghdad in such disrepair that raw sewage is spilling into the rivers.

On a typical morning, as Palmer leaves the Bechtel camp inside the former Republican Palace, a security firm tucks him and others into mandatory flak jackets and links them up with guards. Several times, Palmer says, shooting in the direction of the plant where he works has forced evacuation.

As Palmer walks into what was a sewage treatment substation, shadowed by a guard holding an assault rifle, Palmer marvels at how this plant has effectively been rendered defunct.

"This site has been looted out of existence," he says. Nearly everything of worth, from electric boards to windows - was taken. "The looting turned what was an [ineffective] plant into not much more than a scrapyard, to be honest."

The real culprit, he says, was lack of maintenance due to sanctions imposed after the first Gulf War that made it nearly impossible for Iraq to buy industrial equipment. The intent was to keep Iraq from obtaining materials for weapons of mass destruction, and to drive the economy into ruin and weaken the regime.

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