  |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
  |
|||||||||||||||||
Today, we're going to cover our largest sector, which is infrastructure. And I don't think I have to tell you that in any country, you cannot have economic growth, you cannot have social stability without a solid, dependable infrastructure. As you'll learn in today's presentation, we have a very broad program within the country. It encompasses work that we have done or are doing on the major port, the airports, roads, railroads, water, power, and sewerage. And USAID I'm happy to say has had quite a good impact thus far in Iraq, and we hope that by the end of our infrastructure activities, which are currently projected for December 2005, we will be able to leave much of Iraq better than it was before the war. The presenters today will be Jim Guy and Fred Guymont, both very experienced professionals in the area of both development and infrastructure. And without further adieu, I'm going to present Jim Guy, who will open up the presentation. Thank you. MR. GUY: Good morning. It's been a long time. We had our first public sector conference I think in May of 2003; amazing now. We had our last one in September of '03. We've started a new cycle now, as Richard indicated to you. For those of you who are not familiar with what happened in the past, let me briefly go over who are major contractors are in Iraq. Some of you probably know that. We had to first contract with Bechtel Corporation, executed in April '03. It was for $1.03 billion. I covered a full range of infrastructure activities in Iraq. As Richard said, the whole range. That contract is due to end in December of '04. Most of the projects under that contract are well underway and largely completed, and we'll go through those briefly. We also have a contract with SkyLink USA to operate the airports in Iraq. They have spent over a year at Baghdad and Basra and doing airport operations management. We have with SSA Marine to do the seaport management at Umm Qasr. That contract is finished. They are no longer involved in that seaport. It was turned over to the Iraqi Ports Authority in April or May of '04. We have one other contract that involved infrastructure, and that is with the Corps of Engineers. We asked the Corps to participate with USAID in providing oversight of the Bechtel activities. Bechtel being a very large operation, we thought having a third party to provide technical management capabilities would give AID a better strength in managing the program. The Army Corps has been there since June of '03 and are still there in force. They're embedded in USAID operations in Iraq. Let me go back to the scope of what Bechtel is doing or has done. As Richard indicated, all the major infrastructure sectors, electricity, water and sanitation, buildings and bridges, airports and seaport, and telecommunications. Probably--I should probably say that at the airports and seaports, Bechtel was charged with the rehabilitation activity; that is, the heavy lifting at the airports. SkyLink and SSA Marine did the operations side of it. So, we had a division of responsibility at the airports and the seaport. In the fall of '03, when it became apparent that we needed to do more work in Iraq, and the $18.4 million supplemental was on the way, we initiated a new RFP for additional work in Iraq, in infrastructure. We had a full and open competition for that activity. That was processed, and Bechtel won the second round of that competition. We executed a $1.83 billion contract with Bechtel in January of '04, focusing on all the same sectors but the primary focus on water and sanitation and electricity. And they're involved in all those activities now in Iraq. Let me focus on the sectors now. Let me say that Fred and I are going to divide up this role today. I'm going to do electricity, airport, seaport, telecommunications. And Fred will do the other sectors--water and sanitation, roads and bridges, and building construction. Electricity. We said this to you probably last year. The pre-war capacity of Iraq was about 4,400 megawatts. That's no hard and fast number. We don't know for sure how much it was. The evidence we have is very anecdotal. We think that's about what it was in March of '03. Immediate post-war, when the fighting seemed to have a lull a least, it was about 204 megawatts that was operating in Iraq, actually operating. The rest of it was either out of commission for any number of reasons--lack of fuel, no maintenance, no operators in the site, looting; but that was not operating. And the biggest problem has been well enunciated all throughout the last 18 months. The infrastructure suffered from tremendous lack of repair and maintenance over the 25 years of Saddam's reign. The shortage of spare parts has been well known. A second thing, which probably is not as well known in the power sector, is that Baghdad got a pretty good complement of power for the country; whereas, the other parts of the country suffered that expense. Typically, Baghdad got 18 to 20 hours of power per day. Other places got two to four to none. So, it was--power was directed to where Saddam Hussein lived and his associations lived. So, our first target was to try to get what was there working, try to repair the infrastructure in place. It was hard to do anything new in a short term, as all of you probably know. So, we started repairing the facilities that we found. We started buying spare parts. We started buying chemicals, lubricating oils for the power stations and chemicals for the water treatment at the power stations. We started restoring water treatment facilities at the power stations, because it was once again, these stations were either totally disrepaired or looted badly, across the board, without exception. And we installed a lot of diesel generators in Iraq. All throughout--at airports, seaports, other locations--to provide independent stand-by power supply at critical facilities. The result of this in October of '03, we had achieved our first goal, which was having power greater than it was pre-ward. That was our immediate goal in October, and that was achieved October 8th of 2003. Then, immediately after that, we started into a maintenance cycle, which is necessary, as all you know, to get [inaudible] for the next cycle around. Then we started it, really in serious ongoing projects to rehabilitate the power sector. We're rehabilitating Al Dura power plant, a large plant south of Baghdad, the Basi Thermal Power Station, north of Baghdad. We converted a gas turbine plant to burn diesel fuel--to burn heavy oil rather than diesel. Diesel's in short supply, the fuel. We're adding new capacity at two stations in Iraq, 540 megawatts, both in the north and in the south. We're constructing a new natural gas-fired power station just northeast of Baghdad, which is at a green fields just starting location. We've finished construction of a power line in the south of Iraq. We turned it over to the Ministry in June of '04. We are currently rehabilitating distribution facilities throughout Baghdad, because, once again, it was just horrible condition. I've talked to you about here about the large Bechtel activities. And you have to understand we have a lot of contractors in Iraq. Our partners are doing many numerous, hundred of small-scale infrastructure projects, community-based projects. We have OTI is a USAID partner. We have OFTA. We have our community action programs and others doing numerous small-scale activities in infrastructure--putting in street lights, putting in distribution transformers--at the very lowest level, which we aren't capturing through the Bechtel contract. We capture through other mechanisms. Let's go to--by the way, hold the questions 'til Fred and I are both finished, so we don't take up all the time on one sector. So, I'll finish mine. Fred can do his, and then we can take questions from the group at large. At the airports, when we arrived in Baghdad, they were not operating. There were no lights, or virtually no flights in Iraq except for an irregularly scheduled flight between Basra and Baghdad, because of the restriction on air travel, air traffic in Iraq. At the present time, there's 40 to 50 flights daily into Baghdad, non-commercial, non-military flights. So, the airport is functional as an airport. There's still some security issues around the airport, but it does work as an airport. Facilities are in place that were not there before. What we did at the airport, both Baghdad and Basra, is we built the terminal buildings, the parking lots and office facilities, security systems, electrical systems. We put in diesels at all--at the airports. Air traffic and voice communication systems were put in and installed and tested; repaired the taxiways; repaired the runways. Heating and ventilation systems were installed; fencing. We did everything at the airports to make them functional, including putting in sewage systems and water treatment systems. And both airports are very functional airports if you discount the security aspects of flying in and out of there. At the seaport, the seaport--Umm Qasr is a very large seaport. It has 21 berths. It's one of the largest seaports in that part of the world. But when we arrived there, it was so silted, you could not bring ships in except at high tide; and took them out at high tide. And only then at the terminal--at the berths nearest the channel, where the silt was less. So, it was a very awkward. And there was no power at the airports. Everything was run almost mechanically. So, our first effort, and it started immediately, was to get the dredgers in. Bechtel started dredging weeks after they got there. So the dredging began in April of '03, and went on throughout the summer, because it was such a huge buildup of silt at the seaport. And then that was completed and all the berths were operable by September of '03, and, at that time, we're bringing about 50 ships a month into the port, and unloading them and taking them back out. The operations was done, like I said, by SSA Marine, not by Bechtel. Bechtel did all the reconstruction work. They have a--the grain handling facilities are there--for all the major grain comes into Iraq. The silos are operable. They were not operable before. They had not been used in years. They were full of dust and dirt. There were no fences for security. Looting was a huge problem, 'cause there were no security forces in place. And we put in electricity supply to the port. We [inaudible] back to the grid, actually; restored the customs facility. But now it's a huge passenger terminal now from coming in from Kuwait and from Qatar. It's a huge--and huge ship bringing in used cars and new cars. It's a big transport area, open shipping. Telecommunications. Initially we had nothing in our scope of work to do that, in the initial contract with Bechtel. But it became clear to the CPA, the operating authority in Iraq that there were--it was a huge gap in the telecommunications, so we took on a project to do two major activities in the country. One was to restore the landline capacity in Baghdad, which had been severely damaged during the war and post-war looting. We put in 13 switches, installed them, to restore 240,000 line capability into Baghdad, which had been lost due to the war and points thereafter. We put in an international gateway to provide long distance calling activities. And those are all finished and turned over to the Ministry. We just finished in the last couple of months a restoring the fiber optic link between--it goes from Mosul down to Umm Qasr. So, that completed our infrastructure work in telecommunications. Just a couple of words about our work at the airport and seaport in terms of operations. What SkyLink did at the airports and SSA Marine did at the seaport. There was no management structure. People had fled the airports. There was no one there to run the airports when we showed up there. The Iraqi management was not there. So, we became the proxy managers of the airport immediately, when we arrived. So, we began training. The people gradually started trekking back in slowly. It took a while to get people back in the airport and seaports. We started training personnel to operate the airport. Security persons were trained. Luggage handling were trained. Fire protection equipment. We've provided big fire trucks. They had none. Otherwise, you can't certify without fire protection training. People were sent to Oman to train on how to handle fires at airports. That's basically completed now. Some of the same things at the seaport, except the seaport had a bigger security problem, 'cause it's a huge seaport, and it was vulnerable to people walking in and off the street literally to look for goods and materials. So, we immediately started hiring and training security staff at the seaport through our operations contractor. And I would say that the seaport now works very well, but the silting is starting to build up again. Dredging is a lifetime thing. You can't ever stop dredging. So they still have to do more dredging, the Iraqis do. We also developed and implemented initial port tariffs. There were no real tariff structures in place to collect money for bringing ships in and out of there. And we collected I think some $6 million through those tariffs, which were turned over to the Iraqi Port Authority when we departed. We collected the money in escrow, and then we turned it over when we left. We did not retain the money. I'm going to stop now and give Fred a chance to give his part. And then we'll get ready for questions and answers after Fred has finished. Thank you. MR. GUYMONT: Thank you very much, Jim. And welcome to all of you, and I know you have very busy schedules and thank you for coming out here today. What I'd like to do is start with the water and waste water sector, which, as Jim mentioned, is our second largest investment in Iraq. It's probably about 40 percent of what we've invested in power between the two contracts, something in excess of $500 million in the water and waste water sector. I'd like to characterize the sector before I go much further. As Jim mentioned, there was very little investment, either in capital, infrastructure or in O&M during the last 20, 25 years. As a result of that, Iraq could not supply potable water to its growing population, and waste water treatment plants fell into total disrepair. Right after the war, looting took a heavy toll on water and waste water infrastructure at the plants and at pumping stations. All of this puts Iraq in a very vulnerable situation in terms of health. And water, as you know, potable water is--lack of potable water is a primary cause of infant mortality, mortality in children under five; contributes significantly to diarrheal diseases. Like the electricity sector, our strategy in the water and waste water sector was to rehabilitate existing plants and complete expansions rather than to go in and do a new treatment, a new water treatment plant or a waste water treatment plant. A great deal of effort went into repairing mechanical, electrical equipment, process equipment, repairing and replacing pipes. And, in a number of cases, we purchased chemicals--alum and chlorine--for the water treatment plants. And in a large number of cases, we replaced filter media in the water treatment plants. One thing that we've done through the Bechtel contract is that each of the job orders that Bechtel undertakes has a significant training component. So, if we're working at a particular water treatment plant, before that plant is turned over to the Iraqis, there is a significant training program. And I mean we think this is--I mean, absolutely vital to the sustainability of our investment. Going to some of our accomplishments, as Jim mentioned, we've been working in Iraq since April of 2003, and the first Bechtel contract is coming to an end in the next few months. One of our major efforts on the potable water side was to complete an expansion of a water treatment plant in eastern Baghdad, which will add 50 million gallons a day to that part of the city. And this--to give you--put it into perspective, this will increase the amount of potable water to eastern Baghdad by 45 percent. And I mentioned, no waste water treatment plant in Iraq was operable when we arrived. We are rehabilitating the three waste water plants in Baghdad. We're doing that--some of that work in association with the CPA contracts that were let months ago and overseeing the installation of CPA and Iraqi funded equipment. A portion of one of those plants is completed and in June of this year, Iraq began treating waste water for the first time in over 20 years. Now, those three treatment plants should be completed, fully completed, by early 2005. Another major focus of our work on the water side was in the south in Basra, which, as you might know, is a very water short area. Basra gets its drinking water from the sweet water canal, and the sweet water canal comes from the Euphrates Basin, and the canal is about 240 kilometers in length. The problem Basra has is that is used to take water from the Shatl el Arab, and that--the salinity level has risen to a point where the water is not drinkable. We had a major contract to rehabilitate sections of the sweet water canal. We worked on the two major pumping stations, replacing pumps, installing generators, control equipment. We also worked at the terminus of the canal. There are two large reservoirs, and, like the port, these reservoirs are subject to silting and they pretty much had totally silted up. And one of our major early work orders was to dredge the reservoirs, which extend over, oh, I'd say, five, 10 hectares. So, it's a pretty major job. As part of that work, we're also rehabilitating 14 water treatment plants in Basra. Basra seemed to have added small plants as the population expanded. Where you might expect to see one or two very large plants, Basra had 14 small plants. Some of those were conventional plants. Some of them were package plants, pre-manufactured. That work is--eight of those 14 plants are complete and have been turned over. The remaining six will be done in the next few months, next couple of months. So, we're also doing significant amounts of work, both on the water and waste water side, north of Baghdad and south of Baghdad in the--pretty much in each of the provinces--Mosul, Kirkuk, Najaf, and Karbala, Dialla--on the water side, and, you know, Karbala and Najaf, Babel, Karanisia, and Dialla, on the waste water side. So, this is probably about 10, 15 smaller plants that we're working on rehab of those plants. And that work is also being done on the first Bechtel contract that's coming to an end in the next few months. New projects. Now, the new projects will extend through 2005. They grew out of the second contract that was signed in--when was that signed--in January of 2004. You can just get an appreciation for how quickly the work has been done. You know, normally design and construction extends out over a number of years and everything is being telescoped in Iraq. We have a major effort in eastern Baghdad to increase waste water collection to get sewage off the streets, which presents a significant health hazard as well as an aesthetic eyesore; get sewage off the streets, and we have three projects doing that in various sections, mostly in eastern Baghdad. We're doing more work on the water side, because even with the initial expansion in east Baghdad, the 50 million gallons, that's not enough. So, we're building another treatment plant that will add 20 million gallons, plus we're rehabilitating an existing plant, which hopefully will add another 20 to 40 million gallons a day. Also, in eastern Baghdad, and this is a problem throughout the country, and we're doing a little bit of work on this in Basra, is that the water distribution systems leaks. And we have a program to detect the leaks, repair major leaks, lay new water main. And, as a matter of fact, they've already, under that project, have put down about nine kilometers of new potable water lines. Let's see. I know we're running a little bit short of time here. All in all, you know, I think we've had a very, very significant impact over a very short time in the water and waste water sector. Oh, I should mention, we do have--we've been focusing on cities, but we do have a significant rural water project that we'll supply water to roughly 300 villages. And these villages will have a population of between 1,000 and 5,000 people. They particularly have suffered from a lack of potable water. And those projects will be taken--undertaken throughout Iraq, with the exception of Al Ambar Province, which PCO is doing under a separate contract. All in all, we will have treated about 250,000,000 gallons a day of waste water and about 420,000,000 a day of potable water. I think those are rather conservative estimates. I seen something higher, but it's in that range. And also I think significantly work to reduce leakage in the water distribution systems, both in Baghdad and Basra. Some of our other sectors, our other projects. Jim mentioned the Umm Qasr port. We have a project with the railroad, with the Iraqi railroad to rehabilitate and replace about 72 kilometers of rail between Umm Qasr and Chubaya, which is just west of Basra. And that will enable grain, humanitarian supplies, reconstruction--well, anything that comes in through Umm Qasr to travel by rail up into the--through the rail network. And we've completed about 50 out of 72 kilometers of that. And, again, we're doing that jointly with the Iraqi Railroad Authority. In the summer of '03, there was a very, very significant program to rehabilitate schools. And, under the Bechtel contract, we rehabilitated about 1,240 schools. All tolled, AID rehabilitated about twice that amount. But under Bechtel, it was about 1,240, and that was done over a very, very tight timeframe of a couple of months, three months, and significantly using Iraqi subcontractors throughout the country. Related to that, we've done a lot of work rehabilitating health clinics, which complements our work in the health sector. We did about 50 health clinics under Bechtel, and we did a number--about 10 fire stations in Baghdad. The--and the number of health clinics that were rehabilitated under--by AID in total is probably about 110, 120. So, we did roughly half of them. Also, a project that's completed is we reconstructed three major bridges to the north and to the west of Baghdad. These bridges are all on main trunk roads, and those projects are completed. And, again, we used Iraqi subcontractors, for the most part, to undertake the construction. We also have a project under the second Bechtel contract at 10 different pumping station sites, irrigation pumping sites throughout the country, and that work is just getting underway, working with the Ministry of Water Resources on that. In closing, what I'd like to say is that we've done a lot of construction, but none of that would have been possible without Iraqi construction contractors that did the work for Bechtel. I think that, you know, the security has been an issue in Iraq. I mean, you all know that. But the Iraqi subcontractors, by and large, have been able to work under extremely difficult conditions. And I think one of the big surprises at least for me was how competent and qualified the Iraqi construction industry is. When you imagine, you know, we're doing something along the line of $3 billion worth of construction, and you've got PCO doing construction. I mean, there's a huge volume of work, and it couldn't have been done without our Iraqi counterparts in the construction industry. And also, we've received excellent cooperation from the Iraqi ministries that we've been working with--the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works, the Ministry of Electricity, I'm sure. And the other ministries. With that, I think we've can probably open this up for questions. Anyone has any questions? Yes, sir. MR. : [Inaudible] MR. GUYMONT: Well, the schools program at its height, I think created something like 35,000 jobs. I mean that was in a compressed time frame. Right now, I think overall AID is reporting employment figures of around the same number. It's just a coincidence, but around 35,000 to 40,000 I believe. MR. GUY: Yeah. But the total is about 70,000 jobs at the moment. It's a snapshot, and it does change as budgets change. MR. GUYMONT: That 70,000, though, is total, with PCO. AID is probably half of that. But on each of the--to give you an idea, on each of the water projects, you typically be about a hundred, two hundred folks employed. And that usually extends for at least six to 12 months. So, those are real jobs. Yes. Yeah. Because of the web cast, so we can get the question. MR. CUMMING: Sue Cumming from Reuters. I wonder if you could give an overall picture on the water situation, because quite a bit of money has been taken away from the water and the electricity sector to boost security. So, could you overall say what is the state, because I've read reports recently of the health situation deteriorating; more water borne diseases among young children. So, could you just paint an overall picture, please. And also do you need a lot more money to improve the situation of potable water? MR. GUYMONT: Well, I think that you go back to a World Bank study a year, a year and a half ago, that said the needs for reconstruction in Iraq were something like $50 billion. So, I mean, my judgment, yes, you could put more money into all the infrastructure sectors. They're going to need a significant amount of investment over the next 10 years. Our projects are fully funded, so, I mean, our projects are not affected by any cuts. The cuts were for future activities, so they do not affect our projects. Yes, sir. MR. GOLDIE: I'm Brian Goldie. I'm from Potomac Marine. We're involved in ocean transportation. We've been moving some cargos over to Iraq, and kind of trying to keep track with regard to what's going on with shipments to Iraq. And my question to you is as you look forward to 2005, do you anticipate much in the way of cargo moving out of the U.S. for some of these projects. I was trying to get a handle on if any of these are going to be very large projects or not, and trying to get some input from you on that. If you could forecast that. MR. GUY: Difficult forecast. Yes. All projects require materials and goods and a lot of them come from the U.S. A lot of them come from other countries. So, it depends on an individual project level. But some come in through other ports, as you know. Through Jordan. Some through Turkey. Some through even Syria. So, a lot of ports are utilized depending on where the destination is in Iraq. MS. : [Inaudible] MR. GUY: We do have an ongoing project in eastern part of Baghdad, which will require, at some point, shipment of large scale equipment. But the timing an the size is not known at this time. MR. : [Inaudible]. MR. GUY: That's the plan. Yes, sir. MR. GUYMONT: I might just want to add that AID is only one player doing infrastructure rehabilitation construction. You also have PCO, and PCO's volume of contracts is larger than AID's; so, I mean, what they fund would also very much affect shipping. Other questions? MR. SABBAH: Hi. My name is Basil Sabbah. I'm the CEO of Sabbro, one of the largest construction companies in Iraq. We employ about 300 to 400 Iraqis; done contracts mostly under PCO. We haven't done any work under USAID. We see a pretty seriously deteriorating situation in the country right now [inaudible] for security reasons. But the issue that really concerns us is unemployment. I mean unemployment figures are probably around 70 percent right now. We're a little bit concerned that at no point were any of the prime contracts in Iraq given allocations on utilizations for Iraqi people, neither from a dollar figure nor a number figure. There's incentives on the prime contractors to do it, but only fairly subjectively. There's no numbers tied to it. And we see this as a pretty major flaw that probably needs to at some point be addressed if we're going to really get Iraqi utilization up. And I don't know if there's any plans to do that. MR. GUYMONT: I think that just for cost reasons, there is a strong incentive to use Iraqi subcontractors to the extent possible. Now, I know that Bechtel had a very significant training program for contractors as part of their activity. Offhand, the idea of saying, well, you have to employ 200 folks on this contract really dictates to a contractor what--how he does the work, and we're less interested in, say, how he does the work, and more interested in the fact that he gets the work done. I think we're seeing, you know, increases in the number of Iraqi companies. I mean, I think Bechtel has done something over 130 contracts, subcontracts, with Iraqi firms. I know this probably doesn't answer your question, but I think that the trend is going in the right direction, and it's going to be more rather than less. MR. GUY: I think you're dealing with a contract issue here. And contract officers are very much in charge to what happens inside of contracts. We are technical officers, not contract officers here. So, it's kind of beyond our scope to speculate on what might happen in terms of the future contract and how they may tailor that to address Iraqi employment. MS. BLACK: I'm Joanna Black with [inaudible], and we currently have a vocational training and employment project in Iraq. And my question what you spoke about some of the school rehab, and I was wondering if during the rehabilitation, you did any vocational training or employment center rehabilitation? Do you know anything about that? MR. GUY: No. We only did primary schools. MS. BLACK: Okay. MR. GUY: To this point. I think you had a question. MS. : [Inaudible]. MR. GUY: There is no set aside per se for Iraqi subcontractors. The Bechtel contract specifically addresses this and encourages, very strongly encourages, Iraqi subs being used. There is a set aside for small U.S. businesses, however, in the Bechtel program, and minority-owned business. But there's no set aside numerically for Iraqi subcontractors. And regarding supplies. A lot of equipment is purchased in Iraq, except for the large-scale equipment like gas turbines, which you can't buy in Iraq. Almost all the local supplies are bought locally, from Iraqi suppliers, where possible, to my knowledge. MR. GUYMONT: I think there is--maybe it's already happened, but I think there's an upcoming business conference in Oman that bringing together U.S. and, well, U.S., European, and Iraqi firms. And, I mean, I think that's a good venue to make connections with the Iraqi construction industry. MR. : [Inaudible]. MR. GUYMONT: Yes, sir? MR. GORDON: My name is Robert Gordon. I'm with Creative Associates, and I was wondering what success you've had working with the ministries. Are they forthcoming? Are they taking charge? Are they sort of moving things forward, and are you developing a good working relationship with them? MR. GUYMONT: Yes. I think we have a good working relationship. I think the ministries from what I've been able to see are taking a very active interest in each of our subprojects, and they're--they have a lot to say about the scope of work, and they, you know, they're actively monitoring what we're doing. So, yes, I think they are taking charge. MR. GUY: You have to understand ministers are like people. Every one is different. Some different than others; how we work with them. But they're all involved in our projects, and the same for [inaudible] in monitoring what we do. MR. : [Inaudible] The question is do you foresee a dependency on some of the Kuwaiti companies to facilitate your mission in Iraq, being close to Iraq? MR. GUYMONT: I can't answer that. I can't say one way or another. I just don't know enough about that subject. MR. GUY: Neither can I. [Inaudible]. MR. GUYMONT: Other questions? MS. REGAN: [Inaudible] Regan. How much of the work has to be repeated due to sabotage, and are you finding that it's less and less. For example, I know that very early on, copper wire was being taken which was creating big problems with electricity. And also, do you have a handle yet on how much security and insurance is costing your contractors? MR. GUYMONT: Good questions. Jim can comment on the electricity side, but pretty much with the exception of the incident you mentioned on the water and waste water facilities, we've had no real sabotage of those facilities. MS. REGAN: [Inaudible]. MR. GUYMONT: I would say that maybe it's both. But they're certainly not targets. I mean, our bridges and schools and our, you know, haven't been attacked. MR. GUY: I think they found the oil sector was a lot better target to go after. MR. GUYMONT: I think on the electricity side, we had some problems on--we had a transmission line, 400 kV transmission line in the southern part of Iraq, and towers were knocked down periodically during the reconstruction of that transmission line, but they were put up pretty quickly. And that line went into service in June of this year, and it--there's been very, very little problem with that. MR. GUY: Yeah. I think we learned how to do it--fix it quickly, so the impact was not very severe. So, it's not a good target anymore, because we could repair it next day almost after they tore it down the night before. So, it wasn't effective. They stopped doing it. MS. : [Inaudible]. MR. GUY: That thing is still being assessed. We get that question almost every other day, but we're trying to do a pretty thorough analysis, and we'll have that out I guess shortly. Fred and I are not doing it. Others are doing it. MR. GUYMONT: But there are insurance and security costs that I'm sure everybody that's worked in Iraq well appreciates. I can't--we can't give you a number. We can't say it's, you know, X percent. And that would be meaningless because, you know, our project is a lot different since we're, you know, supplying heavy equipment at times, you know, very expensive turbine generators versus a project that's just technical assistance. So, you have to go within each project. MR. THOMPKINS: Hi. I'm Bob Thompkins. I'm here on behalf of the Weir Group, an engineering services firm that specializes in pumps, among other things. And I have two questions for you. You mentioned local projects that are being carried out outside the scope of the Bechtel contract. Is there a list of those contracts that are ongoing or the RFPs, et cetera, that will be let, and where might one find that? MR. GUYMONT: Well, those projects are ongoing. We've pretty much completed the second round of contracting. You can go to the USAID web page. USAID dot gov slash Iraq. And if you kind of troll around there, you'll come to a list of our sectors, and within that I think those lists who the grantees and contractors are. But, as Jim mentioned, in water and waste water, there is quite a bit of work that's being done under the, both the local governance program and the community action program. And actually, those are very good complements to the Bechtel work, because in certain cases, they work very closely with Bechtel, doing even more institutional strengthening with the various cities and the line ministries. MR. THOMPKINS: And the second question I had relates to the irrigation pumping project that you mentioned, and I believe you said that's being managed jointly with the Ministry of Water Resources. In terms of the actual administration of that contract, is it the ministry or Bechtel/AID that's-- MR. GUYMONT: Bechtel. MR. THOMPKINS: Bechtel's leading that? MR. GUYMONT: Yeah. It's Bechtel. Bechtel would do the direct contracting with the suppliers for that. MR. THOMPKINS: Great. Thank you. MR. GUYMONT: Any more questions? Great. [Applause.] MR. GUY: Thanks for coming. We appreciate your attention. [END OF RECORDED SEGMENT.] |
||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||
 |
|||||||
|
|||||||
|
|||||||
