US reconstruction 'successes' in Iraq falling apart

A report by the federal office overseeing US reconstruction in Iraq says that of eight rebuilding projects, costing some $150 million and previously declared successes, seven are now in disrepair or have been abandoned.

The New York Times writes that the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), which released its quarterly report to Congress Monday, found that the "seven projects were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting, and expensive equipment that lay idle."

The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success — in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections — were no longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.

Among the problems the inspectors found were almost $9 million worth of airport electrical generators that were non-functional, a newly built but non-functional water treatment plant, and an incinerator at the maternity hospital that sat unused because staff could not locate the key to its room.

The Times adds that SIGIR officials said that the eight sites reviewed were picked in an attempt to simulate a random sampling of reconstruction efforts, but that a truly random sample was impossible as many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit.

Bloomberg notes that the audit, which can be found on the SIGIR website, supports the claim that Special Inspector General Stuart Bowen made in earlier reviews of a "sustainment gap" in projects that were built by the US but need to be maintained by Iraqis. Mr. Bowen said in the latest report that this gap would result in the projects' usefulness being "significantly shortened" if not addressed.

Of all the reconstruction efforts, Bowen told The Washington Post, "electricity has the longest way to go," as the Iraqi power system is now producing less energy than it did under Saddam Hussein.

Before the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq's power system produced 4,500 megawatts a day with an aging infrastructure in which 85 percent of power plants were at least 20 years old, the report said. Reconstruction officials initially hoped to increase daily output to 6,750 megawatts by the summer of 2004, a target later lowered to 6,000 megawatts. But in the most recent quarter, Iraq generated only 3,832 megawatts a day.

The shortage was particularly acute in Baghdad. Before the war, the city received an average of 16 to 24 hours of power a day. Last spring, Baghdad averaged eight hours of electricity a day. This year, during the last week of March, the city received only 6.5 hours a day. The rest of the country, however, received an average of 14 hours of power a day.

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