Sewage Saturates Sadr City as Billions Fail to Reconstruct Iraq

By Daniel Williams


Nov. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Spare tires come in handy in Sadr City when lakes of sewage overflow trenches or bubble up from broken underground pipes. Pedestrians pull them from at-ready stacks to create a foot bridge across the excrement.

It’s a routine honed by years of neglect, indifference and, recently, good intentions sucked into a cycle of despair. Almost six years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, sewers in the sprawling Baghdad slum have become the most odorous example of how things don’t get done in Iraq.

While the U.S. has been able to pacify once-roiled areas, electricity is still spotty, drinking water is scarce and health care is limited -- even though America has spent billions of dollars on reconstruction and the Iraqi government has taken in hundreds of millions of dollars in oil revenue.

“Getting rid of this -- how can I put it delicately -- this waste material has become a dream,” says Kamal Hanjab, 44, the district council chairman. “I fear that when I die, I will be buried in it.”

Raw sewage has become something of an emblem for Sadr City, home to 2 million of Baghdad’s 5 million inhabitants. It has swamped streets since at least the early 1990s, flowing freely even as Saddam built himself eight Taj Mahal-scale palace compounds.

The sludge seeped on after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, when American warriors-turned-plumbers tried repeatedly to unclog the works. In 2004, troops pulled a dead horse from one sewer, according to a report on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Web site. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=ad8JHnJwlcUE&refer=home

Did you ever see such a clusterfolly as this?

Did you ever, in your wildest imagination, think it would be as bad as all this?

Out of the sewers and into the streets! The Reign of The Sewer Alligator People Beings!