The US will focus on emergency repairs rather than on major reconstruction of Iraq's crumbling electricity, water and sanitation systems, the top American aid administrator said here on Thursday.
"You won't see a lot of new buildings," said Andrew Natsios, director of the US Agency for International Development. "We are going to take existing infrastructure and repair it."
PHOTO: AP
Natsios said that the problems in Iraq were more complicated than he had initially expected, but he predicted that the US would not increase the size of its US$2.4-billion aid package for Iraq this year.
His comments suggested that the Bush administration may be at odds with British officials, who are overseeing reconstruction efforts in southern Iraq and who favor a more ambitious effort to rebuild a good part of the country's dilapidated power and water systems.
Bechtel Group, the American contractor that has a contract to oversee repairs to Iraq's infrastructure, is also proposing a more comprehensive -- and expensive -- series of water, sewage and electricity projects over the next several years.
More than two months after the war ended, power outages still occur several times a day and have grown worse in many cities because looters have been tearing down high-tension power lines to steal the copper.
Sewage systems are backing up in many neighborhoods, sometimes filling streets with waste, in part because electricity failures prevent the sewage pumps from operating. None of the sewage-treatment systems in Baghdad or most other cities are functioning, which means that waste water is being dumped directly into the major rivers.
Bechtel executives showed Natsios a sewage treatment station in Baghdad that had been looted of almost all its equipment, including a large turbine that thieves apparently removed with the help of a large crane.
Natsios admitted that he had been taken aback by the scale of the looting. He also authorized Bechtel to install six new generators at water-pumping stations in the southern city of Basra.
But Natsios repeatedly emphasized the importance of emergency repairs, while minimizing the need for fundamental reconstruction. "We don't need to build new sewage plants, new water treatment plants," he said."Emergency repairs can probably happen in a couple of months."
British military officials, overseeing reconstruction efforts in southern Iraq, have been arguing that much of this country's infrastructure, especially its power and water systems, were inadequate even before the war and need to be rebuilt rather than repaired.
"All that is happening is local repairs to keep the systems going," said Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Bruce, commander of the Duke of Wellington Regiment, which oversees a large swath of southern Iraq. "What we now need to see are major repairs."
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