A study in construction in Iraq Bechtel busy refurbishing primary schools

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/07/27/MN226442.DTL

Charles J. Fairfield makes sure visitors to Al-Nijoom primary school get to see the toilets.

Not just the facilities themselves, but the new, red plastic water tanks that supply them. Small things, but the school for girls in a decaying Basra neighborhood long had to make do without them.

Fairfield, a lanky and enthusiastic man, works for Bechtel Corp. refurbishing Iraqi schools, and his face grows animated when he talks about their problems. Years of neglect from Saddam Hussein's government left Al- Nijoom with peeling walls and a shoddy electrical system. After Hussein's fall, looters picked the school clean of anything portable or potentially useful -- doors, wiring, windowpanes and frames.

Bechtel, the San Francisco firm that was awarded a $680 million contract to repair Iraq's infrastructure, built its reputation with grandiose engineering - - the Hoover Dam and the Bay Bridge, the Washington, D.C., subway and the Chunnel connecting England and France. But much of its work in Iraq will involve more mundane repairs.

With the academic year fast approaching, the company has begun refurbishing schools -- the kind of hammer-and-nail work associated with Habitat for Humanity or PTA volunteers. When finished, each school will have windows, wiring, fresh plaster and paint on the walls, working bathrooms and fans to ease Iraq's brutal heat.

I am all for building infrastructure but lets look at our own
schools. Bechtel could do some nice work here with the same taxpayer funds.

:(