Who Says America Can't Clean Up the Mid-East Cess Pool?

It was an engineering success on the order of stringing the first cables for the Brooklyn Bridge or coaxing the first glimmer of starlight through some giant telescope to unravel the structure of the universe.

But when it occurred late last month, the achievement remained cloaked in absolute secrecy, marked only by a quiet celebration among participants who may remain forever unknown to history.

Raw sewage was treated in Baghdad.

The stream of treated water that eventually found its way into the Tigris River was hardly more than a trickle, roughly 20 million gallons a day from a city that produces raw sewage at something like 10 times that rate or more. But the accomplishment is all but epoch-making in a city where the sewage plants are in such disrepair that for the last 10 to 15 years, every drop of that muck was poured untreated into the river, fouling everything from boat landings to drinking water systems downstream.

-- A fascinating account via the New York Times at : It's a Dirty Job, but They Do It, Secretly, in Iraq

Posted by Vanderleun at June 25, 2004 3:02 PM