For many Iraqis, safe drinking water hard to find

BAGHDAD – Every day, a man driving a tanker truck filled with water comes to Nashat al-Chamamla’s village in southern Iraq, and every day the people line up to fill their jugs and jerry cans.

“The water we buy from the tanker isn’t clean. You can see the dirt in it,” Chamamla said. “But we drink it anyway.”

Violence has dropped dramatically across Iraq in recent months, but the fight for a better life is just beginning. From electricity and health care to education and the economy, Iraq has many needs, and safe drinking water is among the most urgent.

“The water situation in Iraq is a crisis,” said Bushra Jabbar al-Kinani, an Iraqi lawmaker and a member of the parliament’s services and public works committee. “We see the consequences in the health of our people, and they are very bad.”

Waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid are endemic. A cholera outbreak this summer sickened hundreds. Diarrhea is among the leading causes of childhood illness and death in Iraq, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization.

“Everywhere there is not clean water there is disease,” said Jalil al-Shimari, a doctor with Baghdad’s health directorate. “We see a steady number of people still getting sick from the water problems.”

Though estimates vary, most say that nearly half of Iraq’s people don’t have reliable access to safe drinking water. In a national survey that questioned 8,700 people in August, 58 percent said they can get clean water at least some of the time, according to a Defense Department report. For the rest, every sip is a gamble.

Some families without running water buy it from stores and tanker trucks, but many collect it from rivers, canals and wells that often are badly polluted.

In Baghdad, about two-thirds of the city’s sewage flows untreated into waterways, said Lt. Col. Jarrett Purdue, the head of the water sector for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Gulf Region Division.

International aid organizations, the U.S. and the Iraqi government are all working to improve clean water delivery. Since 2003, the U.S. has spent about $2.4 billion on water projects here, according to an October report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

Most of that has gone to building and repairing pipe networks, water purification plants and sewage pumping and treatment stations. The U.S. also has launched programs to train plant operators and develop the Iraqi government’s capacity to manage its own water projects, said Purdue.

“We’ve definitely come a long, long way,” he said. “Millions of people here have water who didn’t have it before.”

But there’s a long way to go, too.

Most estimates put the total cost of delivering clean water across Iraq at more than $10 billion, and that number goes up every time insurgents target pipelines and pumping stations. A homemade bomb recently broke a water main in Baghdad, cutting service to hundreds of thousands of people, the U.S. military said.

Al-Kinani, the Iraqi lawmaker, said progress has been slowed by corruption and incompetence in Iraqi government ministries.

“They don’t understand the significance of the problem because they don’t go out to meet the people and see the suffering,” al-Kinani said. “This is unfortunate, because the suffering is everywhere.”