Iraq rebuilding projects crumbling, agency finds

NEW YORK -- In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, federal inspectors have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of maintenance, apparent looting, and idle equipment.

The United States has previously acknowledged that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed, or poorly constructed. But this is the first time a federal oversight agency has found that projects officially declared successes -- in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections -- were no longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit, and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.

At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning.

At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked -- Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment -- and, partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages, and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system. The newly built water purification system was not functioning, either.

Officials at the oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said they had made an effort to sample different regions and various types of projects, but that they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit.

So, they said, the initial set of eight projects -- which cost a total of about $150 million -- cannot be seen as a true statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the roughly $30-billion American rebuilding program.

But the officials said the initial findings raised serious new concerns about the effort.

The reconstruction effort was originally designed as nearly equal to the military push to stabilize Iraq, allow the government to function and business to flourish, and promote good will toward the United States.

"These first inspections indicate that the concerns that we and others have had about the Iraqis sustaining our investments in these projects are valid," Stuart W. Bowen Jr., who leads the office of the special inspector general, said in an interview Friday.

The conclusions will be summarized in the latest quarterly report by Bowen's office tomorrow. Individual reports on each of the projects were released on Thursday and Friday.

Exactly who is to blame for the poor record on sustainment for the first sample of eight projects was not laid out in the report, but the American reconstruction program has been repeatedly criticized for not including in its rebuilding budget enough of the costs for spare parts, training, stronger construction, and other elements that would enable projects to continue to function once they have been built.