BAGHDAD - Ahmed Aidan sells bottled water from his small grocery in a western Baghdad neighborhood, and he's lucky he does.
The capital is suffering through a water shortage, linked to the crippled electric grid that doesn't deliver sufficient power to run purification plants and pumping stations.
"The situation is desperate," Aidan said. "We've been getting tap water only one hour a day for a week now. We've gotten only one hour of electricity a day for the past four days. And the water we get during the night is muddy and undrinkable."
Vast sections of the Iraqi capital had been without running water for 24 hours last night, compounding the urban misery in a war zone amid 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.
Baghdad routinely suffers from periodic water outages, but residents described the current bout 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 more than four years after the U.S.-led invasion.
Jamil Hussein, 52, a retired army officer who lives in northeast Baghdad, said his house had 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," 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 water-treatment plants were working, "as far as we know."
"It could be a host of issues," Miller said. ". . . 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."
In the meantime, Iraqis suffer in brutal heat. It was 117 degrees in the capital yesterday. With the power out or crackling through the decrepit system just a few hours each day, even those who can afford air-conditioning do not have the power to run it.
Many Baghdad residents have banded together to use power from neighborhood generators, but the cost of fuel, and therefore electricity, is skyrocketing. Diesel fuel was going for nearly $4 a gallon yesterday.
As expected in the midst of a water shortage, the cost of purified bottled water has shot up 33 percent. A 10-liter bottle now costs $1.60.
"For us, we can buy bottled water," said Um Zainab, 44, a homemaker. "But I'm thinking about the poor who cannot afford to buy clean water."
On Other Fronts
A suicide bomber slammed
a car into an Iraqi police station northeast of Baghdad yesterday, killing at least 13 people, police said.
Most of the dead were policemen and recruits
lining up outside.
A total of 58 people were killed or found dead across the country yesterday, according to officials.
The U.S. military announced three more soldiers' deaths: two killed Tuesday, and
one Wednesday.
- Associated Press
EndText