US rebuilding leaves detritus

BAGHDAD -- A primary-school principal, Fawzyia al Ali, was thrilled when workers appeared this fall with orders to fix up the school. But a month and $38,000 from the US government later, she was left with bitter disappointment and a pool of raw sewage on the playground.

"When they came, they promised me a lot and had an agreement with a big company for construction," Ali said recently while standing by the sewage, which welled up after workers dug in the wrong place to find a septic tank. "I had a lot of hope. They promised a lot, and the result was the opposite."

Ali's Al Julan school, in the Kadasiyah neighborhood of southwest Baghdad, is among several schools in the capital with a list of complaints about renovations this fall supervised by Bechtel International Systems Inc.

The problems, which also include leaky roofs and new water pumps that don't work, highlight the hurdles that American companies and Iraqis face as they work together to rebuild an infrastructure left decrepit by 20 years of war and 12 years of international sanctions.

The complaints about Bechtel also arose as another giant contractor, Halliburton, was accused of overcharging for gasoline delivered in Iraq.

Prevented from working in Iraq since sanctions began, American firms have no background in local market prices, materials, or the labor force and little knowledge about several thousand Iraqi companies that come to them seeking subcontracts.

Bechtel won the government's largest Iraq reconstruction contract, worth about $1 billion, to repair everything from hospitals to the southern port in Umm Qasr. Under the contract from the US Agency for International Development, Bechtel renovated 1,239 schools for a total of about $48 million, about $38,000 per school.

Thor Christiansen, who oversaw school reconstruction for Bechtel, did not give an exact breakdown on how the money was spent on each school. But he said materials and salaries for 10 expatriates who oversaw the work of the Iraqi subcontractors accounted for the bulk.

He said he did not know the salaries of those workers, because it is "hard to differentiate the building sector" costs from other sectors Bechtel is working in, such as helping to improve water and electricity supplies.

But Iraqi school officials say American taxpayers didn't get much bang for their buck.

"For that much money, we can build a new school," said Isra Mohammed, one of four regional planning directors in Baghdad. On her desk sat a stack of complaints about the reconstruction work from schools in the area she oversees.

Two months after the work was finished, students were getting locked into classrooms when new door handles broke. Toilets were overflowing because sewer systems weren't cleaned properly. Children couldn't wash their hands, because handles on new water taps had snapped off. Desks and chalkboards, already in short supply, were in the trash heap after painters had used them as makeshift stepladders. Laborers had carted off working ceiling fans and sturdy doors, and installed cheap replacements, teachers and principals said.

Bechtel, which is based in San Francisco, says that many of the problems arise from poor maintenance.

"These are things that could not have been discovered before the schools were in use," Christiansen said."We got 1 million children back to newly refurbished schools. The fact that some people come back and talk about water taps and this and that, they don't have the big picture."

But Iraqi school officials say they saw the problems coming, and they lodged complaints with Bechtel in weekly meetings during the reconstruction, which ran from July until school began in October.

Najdat Zaki Abdul-Aziz, chief engineer and director general of education planning at the Ministry of Education, said their warnings weren't heeded. He said Iraqi school officials were sidelined and told that those holding the purse strings would make the decisions.

Abdul-Aziz also said Bechtel had not properly checked subcontractors. "Most of them are not contractors. We even heard one is a butcher. He got 15 schools," Abdul-Aziz said.

Christiansen said, however, that only 27 cases had been found in which Bechtel's work was faulty, and he insisted that the company had carefully chosen the 69 Iraqi subcontracters.

"We reviewed their qualifications, which of course were difficult to verify; nevertheless we developed a list of 15-20 companies that competed" for each subcontract, Christiansen said. He also pledged that Bechtel would return to repair problems for up to one year if the company believes it is at fault.

No one had yet caught the poor job done in cleaning the sewage system at Umm Amara primary school, in the Shula neighborhood, another area of Baghdad. Waste poured from the floor-level toilets and pooled in the outdoor bathroom's entryway.

Just outside the bathroom, the handles were all broken on new water faucets, in a long trough used for washing.

Despite such problems, the school's principal, Souad Ibrahim Abed, expressed thanks for any improvement after three decades of neglect under Saddam Hussein's regime.

"We thank Bechtel. They paid a lot of money," Abed said. But "if they had listened to us we would have succeeded much better."