Mike Miller and I went to Aski Mosul yesterday to visit an ongoing project to repair a drinking water drinking plant. Aski Mosul is a small town northwest of Mosul on the Tigris River. Yesterday’s trip took two hours to get to the site. We spent about 15 minutes on the site. Then we took about 1 1/2 hours to get back to FOB Marez. Trips like that can be very frustrating especially when you see that the contractor hasn’t made any progress since the last visit.
This project started in November 2005 and was supposed to last 6 months. Almost 3 years later, we expect the contractor to finish sometime early next month. I’m sure you’re wondering why it has taken so long. So am I! Throughout the life of this contract, there has been a lot of interference by the provincial government. Representatives from the water department have directed the contractor to change pieces of work without getting the proper approvals from our contracting office. So every time that happened, we had to stop all work and get the proper approved modifications in place. I’ll be glad when this one is done. I hope we can finish it before I leave, so I don’t leave the mess for my replacement to fix! In the tradition of the Army, for the first 60 days after he replaces me, he can blame all of the bad stuff on me. After that, he owns it.
On Friday, I headed down to Qayyara, about 1 1/2 hours south of Mosul. I went with Mike Miller, aka mikem, to visit a couple of project sites. The trip was pretty uneventful, the day was warm, and mikem was fighting the Z monster. Actually, I don’t think he was trying to put up much of a fight!
Our first stop was at a drinking water treatment plant. This project has been in construction since October 2006 and is still not even 50% complete. The Iraqi contractor working the project doesn’t seem to mind that it is taking forever to finish. It’s very confusing because he’s working on a fixed price contract, which means that no matter how long it takes to complete, he gets paid the same amount. It seems to me you would want to finish very quickly under those circumstances. That way you could move onto another project and make more profit. One of the local leaders came to visit us while we were inspecting the project. He wanted to know when the contractor would begin working on the project again. I told our interpreter that we were considering canceling the project and starting over with a new contractor. I’m not sure exactly what the interpreter said, but I did hear “inshallah” quite a bit!
On the way out from this project site, I snapped a picture of this flowering bush. I have no idea what it is.
The next project we inspected was a road paving project that runs from the main North-South road to the al Mustantiq village. This is another of my headache projects. And it’s managed by the same Iraqi contractor as the drinking water treatment plant project! There was nothing interesting to see on that road, so I didn’t take any pictures. On the way back to Mosul, we did a little cross-country driving. It made riding in the back of the REVA that much more uncomfortable. But the armor is thick (as Phil would say). This 3ACR patrol had to eat our dust while we were heading back to the main road. The first vehicle is my trail REVA re-entering the dirt road. The 3ACR vehicles are the ones with their headlights on. Their patrol consisted of 2 MRAPs and 2 up-armored HMMWVs (humvees).
