Baghdad's water taps running dry

BAGHDAD — Ahmed Aidan sells bottled water from his small grocery in a west Baghdad neighborhood, and he's lucky he does.

The capital is suffering through a water shortage, linked to the crippled electric grid that doesn't deliver sufficient power to run purification plants and pumping stations.

"The situation is desperate. We've been getting tap water only one hour a day for a week now," Aidan said. "We've gotten only one hour of electricity a day for the past four days."

Vast sections of the Iraqi capital had lacked running water for 24 hours Thursday night, compounding the misery in a war zone amid the blistering heat at the height of the Baghdad summer. Residents and city officials said large sections in the west of the capital had been virtually dry for six days.

Baghdad routinely suffers from periodic water outages, but residents described the current bout as one of the most extended and widespread in recent memory.

Jamil Hussein, a 52-year-old retired army officer who lives in northeast Baghdad, said the water that does flow smells and is unclean. Two of his children have severe diarrhea that the doctor attributed to drinking what tap water was available, even after it was boiled.

"We'll have to continue drinking it, because we don't have money to buy bottled water," he said.

The cost of purified bottled water has shot up 33 percent. A 10-liter bottle now costs $1.60.

Adel al-Ardawi, a spokesman for the Baghdad city government, said that even with sufficient electricity "it would take 24 hours for the water mains to refill so we can begin pumping to residents." Noah Miller, spokesman for the U.S. reconstruction program in Baghdad, blamed the power outages on provinces north of Baghdad and in Basra in the far south where officials failed to cut back after taking their daily ration of electricity.

It was 117 degrees in the capital Thursday, down from 120 the day before, and even those who can afford air conditioning do not have the power to run it.

Baghdad residents who have banded together to use power from neighborhood generators face skyrocketing diesel fuel costs. It was going for nearly $4 a gallon Thursday.