Starved for Power in Baghdad

Ihsan Dhabit has the power to bring sleep and keep food from rotting, to open shops and light streets. But all too often during this miserable summer, he has found himself doing the opposite -- for an hour, for an afternoon, for a day.

Dhabit, the manager of an electricity substation in the middle-class neighborhood of Qadissiya, is a lean young fellow who sits at a wooden desk and punctiliously records his duties in a primitive ledger.

He punches a button on Outgoing Feeder No. 11. Somewhere nearby, it gets darker and hotter.

“We’re supposed to give them three hours on, three hours off,” Dhabit said. “But when there’s not enough power, it’s four off and two on.”

In Baghdad these days, there is never enough power. Dhabit has 12 megawatts to distribute to his 50,000 customers. “But people could use 30,” he said. “It is their dream.”

A lot of dreams aren’t being fulfilled here. If the U.S. occupation authority’s vision of Iraqis gratefully throwing off the shackles of Saddam Hussein and embracing democracy has curdled in the heat, the lack of electricity is a big reason why.

The trouble restoring power also illustrates the mushrooming cost of U.S. reconstruction. U.S. officials originally planned to spend $230 million to relight the country, but now estimate it will take $6.5 billion.

American experts say the prewar electrical grid was in far worse shape than they guessed, and that it broke down completely amid postwar looting and sabotage -- a problem that continues. It now is impossible to transfer or share power around the country. Baghdad will suffer regular outages for the foreseeable future, they say.

The Iraqi engineers say the Americans -- including Bechtel Group, the San Francisco firm hired by the U.S. government to jump-start the Iraqi infrastructure -- should have done more, and done it quicker.

“The Americans have done nothing to fix the power,” Dhabit said. “Any improvements have come from the Iraqis.”

Cliff Mumm, the senior Bechtel executive in Iraq, conceded that the company should have made power a higher priority.

“Now that we know what we know, I’m sure there would have been more emphasis on power,” Mumm said. “Everything depends on power.”

Electricity was never supposed to be such a problem. Iraq’s reported prewar average generation of 4,400 megawatts a day was expected to be quickly reached and then exceeded after Hussein was deposed.

Instead, power hit 3,400 megawatts early in June and stalled while temperatures rose and demand soared. For weeks, none of the coalition leaders seemed to notice. U.S. occupation overseer L. Paul Bremer said June 12 that Baghdad was “producing 20 hours of electricity a day,” a claim he repeated about “most” of the city June 27. Shortly later, most of the city suffered a blackout that lasted several days.

On Aug. 8, the State Department said power distribution was “more stable” than under Hussein. The next day, there were riots in Basra over the lack of gasoline and electricity.

“You know that Clinton campaign slogan, ‘It’s the economy, stupid?’ Here it should be this: ‘It’s the electricity, guys,’ ” said Andy Bearpark, Bremer’s director of infrastructure. “It determines success or failure. Do it right and you can move forward. Unfortunately, it’s the most complex business imaginable.”

Bremer said he expected to hit the prewar benchmark of 4,400 megawatts first by the end of July, then by early September, then by the end of September. But by last Saturday, production had hit only 3,678 megawatts, including about 80 megawatts that were being purchased from Syria and Turkey.

Bearpark took on responsibility for power in early August. Like all the other coalition officials, he works out of a makeshift office. In his case, that’s a converted dressing room in Hussein’s former palace; behind his desk looms a palatial bathroom.

Here is Bearpark’s explanation of why the Iraqi power system can’t get back to where it was a year ago: “Imagine that a college kid has got a clunker of a car, old and rickety. He can keep it on the road because he understands it completely. He knows he has to take a roundabout route to college because if he takes the most direct way, he’ll stall out on the big hill. He knows on cold mornings he can only try to turn it over three times or the carburetor will flood.

“One day he gets sick and doesn’t drive the car for a month,” Bearpark continued. “Then he sells it for $200. The new guy doesn’t start it correctly, which means the fan belt breaks. He tries to run it too quickly, so a wheel comes off. Within a day all he has is a pile of useless junk that can never be driven again.”

The power failure is all the more galling because Hussein, as any overheated Iraqi will quickly tell you, got the power back on in 45 days after the 1991 war, bombed power plants and all.

“A ruthless dictator is able to drive through repairs in ways that are unavailable in a democracy,” Bearpark said. “I’m hardly likely to shoot people who don’t meet their targets.”

* Don’t pay any attention to that dial, Janan Matti said.

Matti is the superintendent of the Daura power plant, biggest of the three that generate electricity in the capital. If all the units in the plant were performing at full capacity, they would be generating 740 megawatts, about a third of what Baghdad needs. One megawatt can light a thousand modern homes.

A panel across from Matti’s desk showed oil-fired units No. 3 and No. 4 producing 186 megawatts, with an additional 21 coming from the plant’s only working natural-gas-fired unit.

It adds up to 207 megawatts, less than 10% of Baghdad’s demand. Yet even this is suspect: The dial marked “total plant” was bouncing around 116.

Matti shrugged, saying the dial must be out of whack, but the discrepancy neatly illustrates a point stressed by Bearpark: All numbers here are unreliable. A technician under Hussein, knowing he could face fierce retribution for failure, had an incentive to make the numbers come out right, no matter what. The Americans don’t really know what the prewar power situation was.

The confusion can be visual as well. Baghdad residents look at Daura’s four smokestacks, which dominate the southern edge of the city, and use them to gauge their chances of avoiding another sticky night. The other day, two towers were belching black smoke, which seemed good.

But the black smoke is instead a sign of how inefficiently the two oil units are performing, producing only about half the power they did when new two decades ago. When the units are running well, the exhaust is barely visible.

Inside the plant, there were signs of disarray everywhere. A preheater, a huge metal cylinder that prepares water for the boiler, had a busted seam, and scalding water sprayed over three floors of machinery. In a few days it will have to be taken down for emergency repairs, which will cost Baghdad more juice.

The spray made a hot room even hotter, which is bad for the turbines, but the air conditioning broke down about 20 years ago. In the control room, an array of warning lights was illuminated. VPS Overload, said one; Fuse Blown, said a second; Fans Failure, said a third. No one seemed particularly worried.

“These are small problems,” engineer Sattar Tahir Bayati said. “Maybe defects in the lights.”

The bigger defects are in the two nonworking oil-fired units, which wheezed to a halt a year ago. They are capable of 160 megawatts each; getting them back in business would go a long way toward solving the city’s power shortage.

The units were supposed to be overhauled last winter by their manufacturer, Germany-based Siemens, working under a United Nations contract. But funding was provided only for rehabilitating the boilers, which produce steam to drive turbines, and even this got off to a slow start.

“We were worried about security,” said Helmut Doll, who is in charge of a half-dozen engineers whom Siemens finally brought in a few weeks ago.

There was a tussle between Siemens and Bechtel over whether Siemens would do the turbines too and, if so, whether Siemens would be paid at the higher U.N. rate. Bechtel was obligated under government contracting rules to put the work out for bid. At the moment, no one is repairing the turbines. Parts lie scattered over the floor.

“Yesterday we told Bechtel to hurry, to be as fast as possible,” said Matti, the superintendent. “They must finish the job before next summer. Otherwise, it will be like this summer all over again.”

Only the entrepreneurs who sold blocks of ice and portable generators enjoyed this last summer. Baghdad regularly went to 120 degrees, which was downright balmy compared with Basra, the nation’s second-largest city, which would hit 130.

Even in the best-case scenario, Baghdad won’t be back to the way it was for quite a while. Under Hussein, the north and the south produced the power and the capital consumed it. Baghdad had electricity practically all the time, whereas Basra, in the south, had only a couple of hours a day.

Now Baghdad is just as intermittent as everywhere else in Iraq. The city won’t get back to full power until the grid is fixed and the country is producing 6,000 megawatts.

Bearpark declined to predict when that would be. “It’s not like it’s going to be 10 years,” he said.

* Across town, Tom Wheelock answered his cellphone and listened for a moment. “So they’re down,” said Wheelock, director of infrastructure projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development. “All right, call me when there’s good news.”

Faulty cables have caused a fire in a southern power plant. That will cost Iraq a couple of hundred megawatts for at least a week, maybe more.

“One unit goes up, another goes down,” Wheelock said. “It’s a constant, constant, constant battle just to stay where you are.”

Breakdowns are one thing, destruction is another. The Army Corps of Engineers surveyed five crucial transmission lines by helicopter in late August. They found 623 out of 2,554 towers had been toppled.

Some of this may have been sabotage. Bechtel said one tower in the south had a note asserting it had been felled to protest the sending of local power to undeserving Baghdad; the U.S. Army said another capsized tower had a note saying it was downed to protest the lack of regular electricity.

Most of the damage, however, is believed to be inflicted by thieves downing the lines so they can strip out the copper. Experts believe the metal is being sold in Iran -- so much, in fact, that prices of some kinds of copper on the world market fell this summer.

Iraqi and U.S. authorities are struggling to protect the towers so electricity can be equitably distributed around the country. But in a country with more than 10,000 miles of high-voltage lines, that’s no easy task. For the moment at least, Basra is producing an excess of power but can’t send it to Baghdad.

Wheelock’s phone rang again. “Let’s see if this is good or bad news,” he said. For a change, it’s good: Forty-five more Bechtel Group people are on the way to Iraq to work on power. One of their crucial tasks is to speed up the ordering of replacement parts so more plants can produce more power.

Electricity is a problem just about everywhere in Baghdad, but conditions vary from place to place. Hardly anyone says they get power on the three-hours-on, three-hours-off schedule promised by authorities. It’s as if someone somewhere were throwing switches at whim.

“Since 5 p.m. yesterday, there is no electricity except for one hour this morning,” said Dhirar Hussain, an electrical engineer. “On the TV news, we see the electricity employees say it is getting better, that the outages are fewer. The reality is different. It’s not better. Especially when the weather is hot, the electricity goes.”

It’s now 4:30 p.m. in the apartment Hussain, 60, shares with his wife, three sons and daughter in the poor neighborhood of Waziriya. The ceiling fan doesn’t turn; the fluorescent bulbs on the walls don’t work; the plumbing and water are out as well.

“If it’s off for a long time, like two days, we’ll take up a collection,” Hussain said.

This has happened three times before, when the summer heat was at its most punishing. A volunteer went around to the dozen families in the building, collecting about 5,000 dinars -- about $2.50.

The same thing happened at the 25 other buildings in the complex. The money was pooled and given to the local power substation workers. Coincidentally or not, the electricity came back on.

Power officials would like to stamp this sort of thing out, knowing that if some are getting more than their share, others are getting less. They say that sometimes the more entrepreneurial substation workers go door to door, extorting money for power. Some power workers are rumored to be getting rich.

Hussain, however, said he’s getting a fair deal, especially because no one has billed him for power since the war began. After all, bribes have a long tradition in Iraq. And it’s still so very hot.

“The weather here isn’t nice like Europe or the United States,” Hussain said. “We can’t make it without electricity.”