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Electrical review turns up 3,700 fires

The ongoing Central Command review of electrical malfunctions that have killed at least seven troops and a contractor at U.S.-occupied buildings in Iraq has uncovered more than 3,700 fires at those facilities from May 2007 to August 2008.

The total dwarfs the 483 fires at contractor-maintained facili¬ties reported to Congress at a July 30 hearing, which the com¬mand’s 15-member Task Force for Safety Actions for Fire and Electricity now says was the five-month figure for one region, not all of Iraq.

But not all of the 3,726 fires re¬ported were a result of electrical malfunctions, the task force says. Only about 820 were definitively characterized as electrical fires, with about 275 of those resulting from “fluorescent light ballast” malfunctions. The causes of the vast majority of the fires were “undetermined.”

On average, 4.2 fires per day have taken place over the past five weeks at U.S. facilities in Iraq, the task force said. These ranged from power strip flare-ups to full-blown fires, Maj. Gen. Tim McHale, who leads the task force, said in a Sept. 15 telephone interview.

Most, but not all, of the 86,000 U.S.-occupied buildings in Iraq are managed by KBR Inc., McHale said. KBR and Army Contracting Command came under fire in that July hearing of the House Oversight and Gov¬ernment Reform Committee, whose members were particular¬ly incensed over what is now re¬ported as 18 deaths — an in¬crease of two from earlier reports — because of inadvertent electro¬cutions, most of them involving U.S. troops, recorded in Iraq since 2003.

Ten of the deaths, however, were not a result of poor electri¬cal work but occurred when four Marines, four soldiers, one sailor and one third-country national Army contractor came into con¬tact with live power lines, accord¬ing to the task force.

The other deaths, however, apparently were accidental elec¬trocutions while working with power equipment and — intwo instances most disturbing to the committee — while taking showers. A Marine, six soldiers and a Navy contractor were killed.

Two of the deaths — that of the Army contractor and Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a Green Beret who died Jan. 2 while taking a shower at the Radwaniyah Palace Complex in Baghdad — remain under investigation, the task force said.

Government testimony cited a lack of skilled or trained person¬nel to perform contractor over¬sight.

McHale said that and other problems are being fixed.

He said the task force is assess¬ing the probability of electrical hazards at the tens of thousands of U.S. facilities in Iraq. None have been placed off limits, but commanders can decide whether to move troops to safer facilities or have a given facility repaired. Meanwhile, inspectors are working first where the risk is greatest, McHale said.

“We are still wrapping our arms around this,” he said. “It’s going to take us several months to work our way through it.”

All of those facilities are tracked on multiple databases. McHale wants to create a joint database to make easier the process of tracking and re¬pairing problems.

The task force also is working with the U.S. Army Corps of En¬gineers to contract with “top-notch” master electricians and fire inspectors and get them to Iraq over the next several weeks to bolster the ongoing facilities review.

Despite that level of expertise, they’ll be pre-tested in the U.S. and run through a seven-day training course in Iraq for certifi¬cation — something all potential contractors will have to pass, McHale said.

Those efforts are part of a three-pronged plan of attack that McHale said includes:

• A safety awareness campaign.

• Development of new plans, policies and standards that in¬clude incident reporting and clos¬ing the loop on such reports, and creating a uniform electrical code for U.S. facilities in Iraq, as ordered by former Multi-Nation¬al Force-Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus.

• Establishment of the train¬ing standards.

“We ask our service members to risk their lives every day com¬bating terrorism,” McHale said. “We must ensure they’re as safe as possible when they return from their missions.”