Running short of power and patience

Ice-sellers on the streets of Baghdad are a good gauge of how well, or how badly, the electric power supply is performing in the Iraqi capital. Sunday was a relatively good day: a man selling ice from a stall told IRIN that the price for a block was 2,000 Iraqi dinars. "Two days ago, when there was a power crisis," he said, "prices went up to 4,000 or 5,000 dinars." He buys ice from a factory and sells up to 50 blocks a day. In the broiling heat of Iraq’s summer, ice-sellers are a common sight, sawing and chipping at their ice as customers cluster round. Before the war, the usual price for a block was just 250 dinars. Almost everyone in Baghdad has a story to tell about electricity. "Now we are supposed to get two hours on and four hours off, but the two hours on sometimes comes for five or 10 minutes and then it goes off again because everybody’s using electrical equipment at the same time," an office worker, Muhammad al-Kazim, told IRIN. "Because of the heat at night we take the risk of sleeping on the roof. All the time there is shooting and there are bullets falling on our roof. You cannot buy food and keep it, so you have to go and do your shopping for each meal." Muhammad al-Khalidi, a driver, is lucky enough to have a small generator at home, but life is still difficult. "I have to buy petrol for the generator, which really costs you. It’s terrible, you know. I have to operate the generator from 12 to 3:30 at night, but I can’t run it longer and I have to switch it off. I read that 3,000 people died in France because of the heat - and what was the temperature? - about 40 C. That is nothing in Iraq, nothing," he declared. The continuing shortage of electricity nearly four months after the war is one of the greatest sources of misery, frustration and unrest among ordinary Iraqis all over the country. In Baghdad, the situation has deteriorated markedly since the war. According to Marcel Alberts, a senior technical adviser for electricity with the UN Development Programme (UNDP), a whole range of factors are behind the current problems. In the past, Baghdad did relatively well compared to the rest of the country. This was a deliberate policy under the former government: energy supplies were channelled to the capital, while cities and towns elsewhere were deprived. For example, two years ago, Karbala had no power for 18 hours every day, Babil none for 20 hours, while Basra had 10-hour power cuts scheduled during the daylight hours. Baghdad, on the other hand, had four-hour blackouts, and last year none at all. Now that policy had been changed, said Alberts, and the pain was being spread more evenly, with the whole country officially on a power schedule of three hours on, three hours off. However, Iraq is generating less power than it did previously. Before the war, the grid covered about two-thirds of the country’s needs. Postwar, only just over half of Iraq’s electricity requirements are being met. Normally, generating stations are given an annual overhaul, but none has been done this year because of the recent conflict. Moreover, no new spare parts have entered the country since February. Contracts for new parts are being processed by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the UN, but the process has been slow. As a result, Iraq’s electrical engineers are struggling to cope. This week, Paul Bremer, the CPA's chief administrator, set a target of doubling supply by next year. Marcel Alberts regards this as a very tough challenge. Looting has also played havoc with the country's antiquated power supply system. At the Al-Quds sub-station in the east of Baghdad, the manager, Ali Talib Ali, had just finished repairing one of the plant’s two units when IRIN arrived. "There was looting here and they took everything we had in the store, so we don’t have spare parts. Whenever we have a problem it’s very difficult to fix it," he told IRIN. The plant is also plagued by diesel shortages, and the staff have to stand in the sweltering heat throughout their shifts, because all the chairs were stolen. In fact, much of Iraq’s power infrastructure is aging and badly in need of an upgrade. "How the Iraqis are able to keep these power stations running is really a miracle: no spare parts, no money, and the units have now been running for about 13 years without proper maintenance because of the sanctions," Alberts told IRIN. The problems do not end there. Perhaps the most serious crisis in the system centres on the transmission lines - the pylons and wires that carry power from the generators. Many were damaged during the war, and now sabotage is frequent. At least 500 transmission towers need repair, according to surveys, and the work, which is currently being funded by the UNDP, is difficult and hazardous. "Last week it was 65 to 67C in the sun when they had to work on these overhead lines - these pylons," said Alberts. "You can’t touch anything of course. You have to wear gloves, otherwise you burn your fingers. It is really unbearable to do this job - and the next day, the next pylon is down." Alberts believes it will be four or five years before 90 percent of the population has regular electric power. That is hardly early enough for people like Tamara al-Ramli who works as a clerk in Baghdad. "Three days without electricity was unbearable," she told IRIN. "You can’t sleep at night. Especially when you have sick people in the house, it’s very difficult, and for anyone with asthma it’s very difficult. Many people are dying because of that. It’s a disaster."