Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Insurgents succeeding in cutting off Baghdad's power supply
Security, Electricity
Over the past six months, Baghdad has been all but isolated electrically, Iraqi officials say, as insurgents have effectively won their battle to bring down critical high-voltage lines and cut off the capital from the major power plants to the north, south and west. The battle has been waged in the remotest parts of the open desert, where the great towers that support thousands of miles of exposed lines are frequently felled with explosive charges in increasingly determined and sophisticated attacks, generally at night. Crews that arrive to repair the damage are often attacked and sometimes killed, ensuring that the government falls further and further behind as it attempts to repair the lines.
What amounts to an electrical siege of Baghdad is reflected in constant power failures and disastrously poor service in the capital, with severe consequences for security, governance, health care and the mood of an already weary and angry populace. “Now Baghdad is almost isolated,” Karim Wahid, the Iraqi electricity minister, said in an interview last week. “We almost don’t have any power coming from outside.” That leaves Baghdad increasingly dependent on a few aging power plants within or near the city’s borders. Mr. Wahid views the situation as dire, while Western officials in Baghdad are generally more optimistic.
Mr. Wahid said that last week, seven of the nine lines supplying power directly to Baghdad were down, and that just a trickle of electricity was flowing through the two others. Western officials agreed that most of the lines were down, but gave somewhat higher estimates on the electricity that was still flowing. “There’s quite a few that are down, and that does limit our ability to import power into Baghdad,” said a senior Western official with knowledge of the Iraqi grid. “The goal and the objective is to get them up as quickly as we can.”
Mr. Wahid said he has appealed both to American and Iraqi security forces for help in protecting the lines, but has had little response; Electricity Ministry officials said they could think of no case in which saboteurs had been caught. Payments made to local tribes in exchange for security have been ineffective, electricity officials said. Neither the Defense Ministry nor the American military responded to requests for comment on the security of the lines.
In response to the crisis, Mr. Wahid has formulated a national emergency master plan that in its first stage involves bringing some 100 diesel-powered generators directly into Baghdad neighborhoods by next summer. That would be followed by the construction of a spate of new power plants in Baghdad and major work on existing ones.
All together, Mr. Wahid estimates, the program would cost $27 billion over 10 years, although some electricity experts knowledgeable about the plan say that even under optimistic assumptions, those enormous expenditures would not bring electrical supplies in line with demand before 2009.
What amounts to an electrical siege of Baghdad is reflected in constant power failures and disastrously poor service in the capital, with severe consequences for security, governance, health care and the mood of an already weary and angry populace. “Now Baghdad is almost isolated,” Karim Wahid, the Iraqi electricity minister, said in an interview last week. “We almost don’t have any power coming from outside.” That leaves Baghdad increasingly dependent on a few aging power plants within or near the city’s borders. Mr. Wahid views the situation as dire, while Western officials in Baghdad are generally more optimistic.
Mr. Wahid said that last week, seven of the nine lines supplying power directly to Baghdad were down, and that just a trickle of electricity was flowing through the two others. Western officials agreed that most of the lines were down, but gave somewhat higher estimates on the electricity that was still flowing. “There’s quite a few that are down, and that does limit our ability to import power into Baghdad,” said a senior Western official with knowledge of the Iraqi grid. “The goal and the objective is to get them up as quickly as we can.”
Mr. Wahid said he has appealed both to American and Iraqi security forces for help in protecting the lines, but has had little response; Electricity Ministry officials said they could think of no case in which saboteurs had been caught. Payments made to local tribes in exchange for security have been ineffective, electricity officials said. Neither the Defense Ministry nor the American military responded to requests for comment on the security of the lines.
In response to the crisis, Mr. Wahid has formulated a national emergency master plan that in its first stage involves bringing some 100 diesel-powered generators directly into Baghdad neighborhoods by next summer. That would be followed by the construction of a spate of new power plants in Baghdad and major work on existing ones.
All together, Mr. Wahid estimates, the program would cost $27 billion over 10 years, although some electricity experts knowledgeable about the plan say that even under optimistic assumptions, those enormous expenditures would not bring electrical supplies in line with demand before 2009.
