Water Taps Run Dry in Baghdad

Firemen extinguish a fuel tanker that exploded near a gas station in the primarily Sunni Mansour neighborhood of western Baghdad, Iraq, killing at least 50 people and wounding 60, on Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2007. Police said the explosion was the work of a suicide attacker. (AP Photo/Asaad Mouhsin) (Asaad Mouhsin - AP)

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. 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.