Jun 07 2008
Qayyara Site Visit
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).
