Power Grid In Iraq Far From Fixed

"Security continues to be a destabilizing factor, leading to project delays and cost increases," the recent update to Congress stated. Sabotage to an oil line has delayed the addition of two combustion turbine units at Baiji power station, it noted. And at the Baghdad South power plant, where 21 workdays were lost because of a mortar attack and the murder of two Iraqi engineers, installation of two new generators will be delayed several months.

The insurgency has also sharply raised security costs for U.S. corporations working in the electrical sector. For example, an ongoing project to install two huge generators at a power station in Kirkuk involves 323 mostly foreign employees who live on-site. Of those workers, 141 provide security for the rest.

"Every month, costs were going up," the embassy official recalled. "And we'd have weeks with no work getting done."

After U.S. occupation officials transferred political authority to an Iraqi interim government in June, the U.S. Embassy's Iraq Reconstruction Management Office took over the rebuilding effort from the Pentagon.

The relationship between U.S. and Iraqi officials then changed -- they became more like consultant and client, as the embassy official put it. And different kinds of problems surfaced, including "a general resistance by some Ministry personnel to accept responsibility for managing and operating power stations," said the recent report to Congress.

"There's an apathy within the plants," Whitaker said. "They haven't grabbed it and said 'good.' "

Taylor and Whitaker blame the lethargy on years of working in a system in which the fear of punishment reduced individual initiative. "When you made a mistake under Saddam Hussein bad things happened to you," Taylor said. "There was not an incentive . . . to take responsibility."

An Iraqi businessman, Khalid Baderkhan, whose firm manages electrical construction projects, offered another explanation. Many ministry employees, he said, are holdovers from the Hussein government who got their jobs through patronage and see change as a threat. As products of a state-run, socialist economy, he added, they lack modern management skills, and do not appreciate the importance of costs, schedules and quality control.

"As long as people in control of the ministries are the old guard who act like mafias and are controlling all management and financial dealings," it will be difficult to make headway in improving the power system, said Baderkhan. "If they don't benefit" from a new project, he said, "they will block it."

Reconstruction chief Taylor said poor information plagued the effort from the start. "Everyone assumed that the plant and equipment just needed some work." he said. "Well, it turns out it needs a lot of work. We assumed the Iraqis could and would take care of it and that's proven to be a wrong assumption."

U.S. officials moved millions of dollars designated for electricity improvement to the Oil Ministry to facilitate projects needed by power plants, such as improving a natural gas line from the southern oil fields. But the Oil Ministry moved slowly or not at all on these projects, the embassy official said.

There have also been "delays caused by the transition" to a new Iraqi government, the report to Congress stated. In the three months since the Jan. 30 election, construction projects, major new contracts and government reorganization were put on hold until a new government was formed.