![]() Patching up Iraq has been slower and more difficult than anyone imagined. Maoula seems skeptical there will ever be improvements.Īs well he might. A cooling system on the fritz means that each of the two generators is running at 50% of its 24-megawatt capacity. He and Zarbo discuss the condition of the 30-year-old power plant, undamaged by the war but badly in need of an overhaul. Maoula leads the Bechtel engineers into his dilapidated office his phone doesn't work. He and his 60 workers haven't been paid in more than a month. After toiling for years in the state-owned utility system, he had just been promoted to run Shuaiba-when along came the U.S. A Shia Arab living in an area Saddam Hussein long repressed, Maoula may be relieved to see the last of the dictator, but he is still bitter. Like many senior Iraqi directors, Maoula speaks broken English. "This is Shuaiba," smiles Hashem Maoula, the plant manager. "Is this Shuaiba?" he asks, offering his business card written in Arabic. Robert Zarbo, a Bechtel engineer working in Iraq, approaches a middle-age man who's wearing a dress shirt and slacks. After half an hour or so, the Tahoe drives up to a gated complex with a barbed wire fence and from there to a small low-lying building surrounded by a handful of Iraqis in jumpsuits. Today's problem is an unreliable military map. The place is not far from where, only days before, a Bechtel team doing a low flyover in a military helicopter to assess damage to power lines had to dodge bullets from snipers. Highway 80 is the road that was dubbed "the Highway of Death" in the first Gulf war.
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