Halliburton Accused over Iraq Water Supplies

Is it possible that a part of the oil industry is making the drinking water unsafe in Iraq, where water treatment was already damaged under a decade of sanctions? By the way, Halliburton’s website can be found here.

Halliburton, the vast Texan oil and military services corporation, was accused by former employees yesterday of supplying contaminated water to American troops and Iraqi civilians at a marine base in Ramadi.

The claims by former employees, who gave evidence to Democratic senators yesterday, was backed up by internal Halliburton emails relating to the untreated water and the health problems it had caused in Camp Junction City, as the Ramadi base is called.

“The level of contamination was roughly 2x the normal contamination of untreated water from the Euphrates river,” said one email dated July 15 2005 from William Granger, an employee of Halliburton’s subsidiary, KBR.

In the email, quoted by Associated Press, Mr Granger said untreated water had been supplied to the camp in Ramadi for about a year.

Halliburton, the company once run by the vice-president, Dick Cheney, has denied the claims of its former workers, and the marine corps said that water quality records for last year showed no sign of problems. Halliburton now runs a water treatment plant at the base.

However, another former KBR employee, Ben Carter, a water expert, said he found evidence of contamination last March and immediately sent an email about the problem to his colleagues.

“It is my…

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Ari Paul has written for The American Prospect, In These Times, Tikkun, Z, Punk Planet, openDemocracy.net, Reason and other newspapers and magazines. He is also a reporter for The Chief-Leader, a New York weekly covering labor in the city.