Gossamer Helps Black Out Baghdad : Electric power: Unknown material, apparently dumped by allied planes, creates short circuits. Officials say it will take billions of dollars and many years to repair the plants.

The blackout of Baghdad began with gossamer falling from the sky and ended with the thunder of missiles, city power officials said Saturday.

The result, they said, left this city of 4 million people without electricity and facing at least three years of reconstruction to repair a few moments of damage.

Iraqi officials took reporters on a tour of damaged Baghdad power stations Saturday for the first time since war broke out Jan. 17. Earlier, security concerns had put such plants off limits.

“When you cut electricity, you cut water. All civilian work stops,” said Zouheir Abdul-Hadi, manager of the 640-megawatt Doura power plant in south Baghdad.

He showed reporters handfuls of an unknown shiny, gossamer-like material that allied planes apparently dumped over power lines and substations Jan. 17.

“Then two days after that, they bombed the power station,” he said.

The Iraqis apparently don’t know what the material was, but it created short circuits that shut down nearly the whole system. At the smaller Taji plant north of Baghdad, some type of bomb apparently caused the gossamer to explode above the plant.

The missiles that struck Doura left its camouflage-painted concrete shell largely intact. But the vast interior was a ruin of twisted metal, burn-scarred turbines and shattered roofing tiles that clattered underfoot.

The girders that once held the roof had collapsed, leaving the massive turbine open to the sky.

Reporters who were in Baghdad at the time of the attack said they saw cruise missiles hit the station, the most important source of power for the capital.

Abdul-Hadi said it had cost $500 million to install the station’s four German and Italian power units in the 1980s. He estimated it would take at least three years to rebuild.

With similar devastation nationwide, Iraq will need billions of dollars and several years to repair its power facilities alone.

Damage to airports, roads, bridges, factories and other facilities could rapidly multiply the reconstruction costs.

At the Taji plant, operating engineer Rabi Mohtem said two people were killed and nine injured when missiles struck the plant two days after the rain of gossamer.

“I saw two people, young, 20-21, killed before my eyes. Why?” Mohtem said.

He said they were killed when a missile hit the plant as they were fighting a fire caused by an earlier one.

Mohtem said the Japanese-built, 140-megawatt plant had cost about $100 million.

“We have to rebuild it after the war,” he said. “The people, the hospitals need electrical power.”