I took the following notes yesterday morning before work as I watched the video that’s linked. For some reason, although the same link and description are still available on C-Span today, the audio file isn’t working this morning so my comments are incomplete. Hopefully, whatever problem C-Span is experiencing will be corrected soon enough but I find it odd that another part of the series, Iraq Vignette: U.S. Patrol Near Balad, is working just fine.
Iraq Vignette: Basra Oil Infrastructure [ Real Player ] (via)
Iraqi freelance journalist Mahmood Al Bachary visited several refinery facilities in and around Basra related to the city’s oil infrastructure, including the Shuaiba refinery, a propane distribution station and an Iraqi gas station. This is the latest in a series of vignettes to look at day-to-day life in Iraq, three years after US troops invaded the country.
In just 4 months, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, an unnamed subcontractor from Karachi, and Kellogg, Brown and Root, restored the Garmat Ali Water Treatment Plant, a facility that is the first step to providing water that is essential to the process of extracting oil in the south. The target goal is to restore oil production there to 2 million barrels per day.
Shuaiba Refinery, one of the biggest refineries in the Middle East, is located in Basra. It employs more than 3,000 workers, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In the past three years, the British army, in “collaboration” with the Ministry of Oil, restored the plant that had been devastated by 10 years of sanctions. Muftea Oil Refinery distributes the fuel refined at Shuaiba, to Iraqis, and it is also exported through the ports. The report wasn’t clear how much oil is being exported but the amount being sold to Iraqi citizens seemed to be only enough to provide the barest of essentials to a small number of people and the price and availablity is determined by the refineries. In other words, Iraqis sometimes can’t afford a jug of propane even if it’s available. It’s delivered to market by donkey carts or sold in a shop, the one in the report, just a battered tin shed.
Mott MacDonald is the British engineering company working on reconstruction projects at Shuaiba. Mahmood Al Bachary, the Iraqi freelance journalist who visited these sites, was only allowed to film the western side of the plant which might be reasonably explained as a security issue. But he was also not allowed to go into the plant and talk to workers or ask them questions related to a recent strike there. Who does that protect?
Iraqi oil workers make one-fourth the salaries of Gulf oil field workers everywhere else. I wonder how much the private contractors are making at the same plant?
Or those who are working on this base?
Are U.S. bases in Iraq built to stay?
Some Iraqis are suspicious, Rumsfelt(sic) calls it ‘interesting question’
By Charles J. Hanley
20 March 2006 Associated Press
Army engineers say 31,000 truckloads of sand and gravel fed nine concrete-mixing plants on Balad, as contractors laid a $16 million ramp to park the Air Force’s huge C-5 cargo planes; an $18 million ramp for workhorse C-130 transports; and the vast, $28 million main helicopter ramp, the length of 13 football fields, filled with attack, transport and reconnaissance helicopters.
Turkish builders are pouring tons more concrete for a fourth ramp beside the runways, for medical-evacuation and other aircraft on alert. And $25 million was approved for other “pavement projects,” from a special road for munitions trucks to a compound for special forces.
The chief Air Force engineer here, Lt. Col. Scott Hoover, is also overseeing two crucial projects to add to Balad’s longevity: equipping the two runways with new permanent lighting, and replacing a weak 3,500-foot section of one runway.
Once that’s fixed, “we’re good for as long as we need to run it,” Hoover said. Ten years? he was asked. “I’d say so.”
Away from the flight lines, among traffic jams and freshly planted palms, life improves on 14-square-mile Balad for its estimated 25,000 personnel, including several thousand American and other civilians.
They’ve inherited an Olympic-sized pool and a chandeliered cinema from the Iraqis. They can order their favorite Baskin-Robbins flavor at ice cream counters in five dining halls, and cut-rate Fords, Chevys or Harley-Davidsons, for delivery at home, at a PX-run “dealership.” On one recent evening, not far from a big 24-hour gym, airmen hustled up and down two full-length, lighted outdoor basketball courts as F-16 fighters thundered home overhead.
Long-term capability
“Balad’s a fantastic base,” Brig. Gen. Frank Gorenc, the Air Force’s tactical commander in Iraq, said in an interview at his headquarters here.
Could it host a long-term U.S. presence?
“Eventually it could,” said Gorenc, commander of the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing. “But there’s no commitment to any of the bases we operate, until somebody tells me that.”
“I think we’ll be here forever,” the 19-year-old airman from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., told a visitor to his base.
‘Iraq was awash in cash. We played football with bricks of $100 bills’
At the beginning of the Iraq war, the UN entrusted $23bn of Iraqi money to the US-led coalition to redevelop the country. With the infrastructure of the country still in ruins, where has all that money gone? Callum Macrae and Ali Fadhil on one of the greatest financial scandals of all time
[ Read the article ]