Another Supply Screwup by KBR

A Houston television station alleges that our soldiers had to steal water to survive in Iraq. It's unclear when this happened but it looks like there were water problems as recently as 2008, per Sgt. Porter.

“I mean it’s yellow, and it’s filthy,” said Sgt. Casey J. Porter.

Porter, an aspiring filmmaker, took video footage of rust-colored water from faucets at Camp Taji in 2008. By that time in the war, Taji appeared less like a war zone and more like a mall.

“You can eat Subway, Burger King, you can buy a $1,200 Oakley watch, but you can’t have clean water to brush your teeth with, what’s the real priority here,” Sgt. Porter said.

Some soldiers complained of being rationed to 2 - 3 liters a day; Army manuals say you need at least a gallon a day. The water storage trucks that accompanied the soldiers were hard to find at times and, when found, often contained chemically treated water that was almost as bad as remaining thirsty. Yet, when the men went to water storage areas maintained by civilians they found - and appropriated - plenty of water.

And the water they did get at their bases was far from clean.

Turns out, at many similar bases, the water was supposed to be processed by Houston-based company KBR. In an internal KBR report, the company sites “massive programmatic issues” with water for personal hygiene dating back to 2005. It outlines how there was no formalized training for anyone involved with water operations, and one camp, Ar Ramadi, had no disinfection for shower water whatsoever.

“That water was two to three times as contaminated as the water out of the Euphrates River,” said former KBR employee Ben Carter.

Carter, a water purification specialist, was the one to blow the whistle on it all. He said he first noticed a problem when he found a live maggot in a base toilet at Camp Ar Ramadi. He subsequently discovered that instead of using chlorinated water, the soldiers’ sinks and showers were pouring out untreated wastewater.

What did we get right in Iraq?