Today was full of interesting events. First, I was the referee for an Iraqi meeting. The background for this event was as follows. Yesterday, Friday, members of the logistic staff that I advise spent eight hours walking through one of seven buildings as part of the building turnover process; a process that should have taken about two hours max. Instead of taking inventory of the furniture and equipment the receiving Iraqi Unit counted every item in the building. Every light, light switch, electrical outlet, sink, faucet, each handle on the sink...how many hot and cold, the steps...it was ridiculous. At the end of the day they opted not to sign for the building because they wanted to count all the stuff in all the building and sign for everything all at once. Sounds great but not if you are going to take you eight hours to inventory one building...and heavens for bid these receiving officers work when it is dark out. I knew about the detailed inventory yesterday but since I did not have an interest in knowing how many electrical outlets were in each room on each floor I left the "counting party" in order to better use the daylight. I was not informed of the fact that they did not sign for the buildings until this morning.
So before we all jumped into the vehicle and headed up to the new buildings I felt it best to have a quick meeting with "us" and "them" to discuss what we, collectively, hoped to accomplish today. The ten minute meeting turned into a forty-five minute debate on essentially, how there is no trust among Iraqi soldiers and the building turnover process will take at least a week to accomplish. They why did you arrive only two days ago with an assigned start date for training on Monday? In the end it was agreed to inventory, sign-over and receive the keys for each building one at a time and we will work until midnight to turnover all the buildings today; funny...that was the original idea presented in the first two minutes of the meeting. By the end of the day they had 4 of 7 keys in hand and quit working at 5 PM...must be something about the dark that frightens this group. However, the real excitement came at 4 PM.
At 3:30 I get a call over the radio..."there is a water leak in one of the buildings you need to go investigate." Great - off I go with a five man working party following in trail about 10 minutes behind me. I get to the problem building and thank goodness someone took the initiative to turn the water off. Remember the other day how I was "taken-back" by the fact that the Iraqis use buckets of water and squeegees to clean the floors - even the second floor. Well that was only the beginning. A few...heck even 10 buckets of water would have been easy to handle instead of the 1/2 inch deep water sitting on the entire second floor of the classroom building. It seems the water was inadvertently turned-on to the building, the water was not to be turned-on until tomorrow, and one of the valves in the bathroom was left open and about 4,000 liters - or about 1140 gallons, if my math is correct - of water poured onto the second story floor. Luckily the floor was all tile and after about 1 hour and twenty minutes most of the water was down the stairs and out of the building. The only place that leaked was around the edge of a drain pipe and considering the amount of water in the area I was very surprised the leak was so minimal. I will have quite a diverse resume after I leave this job - I am already qualified as a Combat Construction Coordinator...I think I can now add Foreign Forces Facilitator and Senior Squeegee Supervisor to the list. I wonder what tomorrow will bring.
No comments:
Post a Comment