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Ear to the Ground

Rebuilding of Iraqi Pipeline as Disaster Waiting to Happen

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Posted on Apr 25, 2006

It’s not just insurgent attacks but also incompetence and mismanagement by entities like Halliburton and the Army Corps of Engineers that are holding back the rebuilding of Iraq.


N.Y. Times:

By JAMES GLANZ

When Robert Sanders was sent by the Army to inspect the construction work an American company was doing on the banks of the Tigris River, 130 miles north of Baghdad, he expected to see workers drilling holes beneath the riverbed to restore a crucial set of large oil pipelines, which had been bombed during the invasion of Iraq.What he found instead that day in July 2004 looked like some gargantuan heart-bypass operation gone nightmarishly bad. A crew had bulldozed a 300-foot-long trench along a giant drill bit in their desperate attempt to yank it loose from the riverbed. A supervisor later told him that the project’s crews knew that drilling the holes was not possible, but that they had been instructed by the company in charge of the project to continue anyway.

A few weeks later, after the project had burned up all of the $75.7 million allocated to it, the work came to a halt.

The project, called the Fatah pipeline crossing, had been a critical element of a $2.4 billion no-bid reconstruction contract that a Halliburton subsidiary had won from the Army in 2003. The spot where about 15 pipelines crossed the Tigris had been the main link between Iraq’s rich northern oil fields and the export terminals and refineries that could generate much-needed gasoline, heating fuel and revenue for Iraqis.

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By felicity smith, April 25, 2006 at 9:50 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

There are multiple problems across the board in the rebuilding efforts in Iraq.  The government comptroller said this morning, among other things, that there is massive corruption in the government and among some American contractors, read Halliburton: There is a huge discrepancy between the oil being pumped and the revenues it should generate. If things continue as they are, it will only get worse because there is no method in place to make anybody accountable. Foreinstance, presently contractors are being paid based on “effort” rather than results, a situation he found deplorable.

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