Rebuilding of Iraqi Pipeline as Disaster Waiting to Happen

[gristy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/world/middleeast/25pipeline.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


The partly destroyed bridge over the Tigris River at Al Fatah, Iraq, which was bombed by American forces in April 2003, cutting off a road and a series of oil pipelines.

By JAMES GLANZ
Published: April 25, 2006

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.
<snip>

"Typically when you manage a project, you have people who can tell you that you've got so much of your project finished and this much money that has been spent," said Gary Vogler, a senior American official in the Iraqi Oil Ministry. "We couldn't get anything like that."

[maddezmom]

1. duplicate

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2245750