Post 10 - Al-Faw Palace

Al Faw Palace -- former "hunting lodge" for Hussein



chillin on the throne


There was a “ground show” at the Iraqi Air Force base today. The Air Force has been working hard the past few days to get all their planes spit shining for the presentation. Apparently, important Generals will be attending. Therefore, as a security measure, all work on the housing and hanger projects have been shut down for the day and only those attending the ground show may be on the premises. Ya know what this means?

For the first time since I've been here, I have a day off!

Now, some people got friends in low places. I just happen to have friends in high places -- Al Faw PALACE, that is. Well, ok, I have friends who have friends in high places, I didn’t actually know the Al-Faw Palace contact until Mike introduced us today, but that’s not the point of my story. The point is, I will be getting a private, behind the scenes tour of Al-Faw Palace --Saddam Hussein's "hunting lodge” that is in rankings with Buckingham Palace in terms of size.



Friends in high places pay off -- "The Chief" hooks us up with a private tour.




At first glance, it’s impressively massive and glamorous with its marble floors and columns, extravagant chandeliers, and gold trimmings.











Suddam put his signature on everything -- seen here on the top of the exterior columns

However, I stand corrected after my friend’s friend in high places, commonly known as “The Chief,” gave me the tour.

Hussein’s hunting lodge was for his own “zoo” located in a different area of the former resort. This was essentially a fenced in, personal safari; full of exotic animals so he could go hunting when it pleased him. Across the way, there’s actually a marble house that is appropriately dubbed the “Lion’s Den” because that’s where Hussein kept a lion – just because. Imagine, a zebra in the desert of Iraq, drinking out of the man-made canal, and a hippo lounging in the man-made lake. (it should also be noted, the canal and lake system here on base – which is connected to the Tigris River and Euphrates River—was filled using nearly all of Baghdad’s potable drinking water. Hussein told his people that the clean water supply was in short and he could not provide any more than one source, when the truth was that he was a germ-a-phobe and used the city’s clean water supply to fill his own lakes and canals (but even the potable water here isn't clean so I guess the joke was on him!)

Anyways, despite the exotic animals, the impressively clean canal water (or so he THOUGHT) and the shear massiveness of the structure, Al-Faw Palace was similar to the man who built it – pathetic.

• Marble floors and walls – a thin, cheap façade – covering up a poor concrete and brick job.
• Marble columns – thin, cheap façade. The inside of the columns were filled with broken pieces of the same brittle yellow brick used on the housing, mixed with mortar and smoothed to be a round column and then covered with a thin layer of marble.
• The chandelier – plastic! (and only held up by the electrical wiring that lights it—I avoided standing directly below the big one in the entrance hall)
• Stain glass windows – also plastic!
• Gold trimmings – painted aluminum.

The size is the only thing that’s real, oh, that and the fact that Hussein’s initial are practically everywhere. The trimmings, the marble floors, the walls, I mean EVERYWHERE.

Pretty pathetic for a tyrant, eh? At least, that’s what my opinion is.

When I left the palace, I was still excited about the day’s enlightenment, and then I ran into Waleed, the project engineer for housing and hanger. He asked me, “Why did you not come to the ground show today? The General (of the Iraqi Air Force Base and also Saddam’s former private pilot) asked where you were (ok, so I do have at least ONE friend in high places. In fact, me and ole General Kareem have even had tea a few times together. That’s right, we’re tight) … Minister of Defense was at the show and the General wanted to introduce you to him.” Whoops.

Podium Barrack Obama gave his speech on when he stopped by a few days before.

Interior of the palace

Chandelier from the top -- did I mention-- PLASTIC!

Post 9 – There may be hope… (tagline story continued…)

A miracle happened on site today. I can go home tomorrow and say, “I made a difference in Iraq.”

It’s been a day or two since the tagline incident and for those few days, the tagline was utilized on the pallet when lifting the bricks, I had had a chat with the crane operator and the swinging was reduced, and they were even the bricks by creating an assembly line of workers to instead of just flipping them out and breaking half of them. But that work was done by the Nepalese and Iraqis.

Today, no bricks had arrived yet but the framework for a concrete placement was in the making. Concrete and all things related was the job of the subcontractors – the Turks… my best friends…

I returned to site after lunch to find the crane lifting a load of framework to the upper story, no tagline and one of the men teetering on the edge of the 8-9 inch wide brick wall of the second story without any fall protection. He was balancing 30ft up in the air and simultaneously trying to steady the crane lift as it came closer.

Again, I will emphasize that ALL a tagline is, is a rope dangling from the load so that you can grab it and help control the load. It is a safety pre-caution that actually makes life EASIER. But they refuse to use it!

Of course, Ahmed (the Safety Officer on site) and Bassam (The turkish subs –77 Company—safety officer) were out to lunch – not that they would have stopped them anyways.

As Mike and I pull up and see the scene unravel, I say, “How did this just happen?” Mike responds, “No, this IS happening.” With that, we get out of the truck and I march over.

First I tell the Turk that is balancing on the edge to put on a fall protection harness. To my surprise, he said, “Ok,” and put it on. Weird. He points to the rebar that he has hooked his harness to, gives a tugging motion and throws his hands up in defeat – this is Turkish sign language for “my movements are now restricted and I can’t do my work.” Well, that’s what I assumed he was saying. None of the Turkish speak English and I can’t say more than merdivan --“ladder” and terazi -- “level” in Turkish. I attempted to explain back that he’s only steadying the crane and doesn’t need to walk around. Though, due to my lack of Turkish and his lack of English, he probably thought I said “tough shit.”

Well, at least he’s not going to fall while I’m on site—he’ll take it off as soon as I leave.

Right, Turkish dude will not fall to his death in my presence – check. Next mission– crane and tagline. Hm, there’s a second crane today, one which I’ve never seen before, and with it, a new operator. This is now more than just a tagline situation.

Step 1 – I stop the crane load and make the workers to put on a tagline.

Step 2 – As they busy themselves with this, I make a quick inspection of the crane.

Cables don’t look frayed. Looks oiled (but tough to tell with crane still up), and out-riggers are on a level surface and in good condition.

(The cable snapped yesterday on a neighboring site, sending a trailer to a devastating final crash. Fortunately, no one got hurt, but I’m now paranoid because we use a crane every day.)

Step 3 – Figure out how to find out if this new guy is certified or at least has experience (anyone with a driver’s license can legally operate a crane in Iraq so I’d like to at least know this isn’t his first time behind the controls). The difficulty is that I can’t just ask. First, he doesn’t speak English. Two, if I just ask he’ll lie to keep his job and then Andalus (the company) will probably just make up paperwork to show he is certified and the crane has been inspected and I’ll have no way to prove the documentation isn’t real.

I have absolutely no clue how to approach this situation. Mike is next door at the communication and radio project, so I’m on my own. I decide the best course of action is to wing it.

So, the work continues with the new crane. I watch it for a bit and then work my way over to Kareem—the usual crane operator who is now just standing around since his crane isn’t being used at the moment. Kareem and I get along well and he loves to talk to me when he gets a chance. Unfortunately, he only knows about 5 words in English. (Whenever I want to give him instructions, there’s a lot of drawings involved.) I try to ask him about his job as casually as I can. It’s important that he sees my questions as curiosity, and not in any way threatening. How long has he been operating cranes? I ask him. Big cranes? Little cranes? (I know that Kareem is a good operator, I’m not worried about him but you’ll see my point in a moment). Turns out Kareem is licensed to operate big cranes and he’s worked in the US and in Tokyo! He very proudly shows me his license. (I’m on my way to success).

I ask about the new guy – “What about him? Good? Does he have a license like you too?” Kareem, tilts his head from side to side and shrugs his shoulders. After a LOT of hand gestures, I find out that New Guy does have a license. He’s been doing it for a few years and is pretty good, but he swings too quickly with it, and isn’t as experienced as Kareem. Besides, he’s only worked in Iraq, Kareem points out, and definitely does not have the skills to work in Tokyo or the US. I nod my head in agreement.

I compliment Kareem on his skills and experience. I bring up the tagline and explain how he understands how important it is and the he knows the correct way to operate a crane.

Yes, it may seem that I am patronizing the man, but I’m not—everyone deserves a compliment when they do well. But, yes, I will admit I am taking advantage of the situation to extract information, wouldn’t you?

I spend most of my day telling the QC, Safety officer and the workers what they are doing wrong. If this is all I did, they would grow weary of me very quickly and would only make progress more difficult. And so, I do my best to say something positive before I comment on something that is wrong (unless what they’re doing is really bad – like dangling off edges with no fall protection and a swinging crane is inches away).

All the workers pretty much assume every word out of my mouth will be comment intended to correct them, and they see most of these corrections as slowing the work down. I.e. not throwing the bricks so half of them break – is seen to them as a drawn out process that makes unloading take twice as long. They don’t see the big picture, that even though it may take longer to unload the bricks, they won’t need as many truck loads if all the bricks stayed intact. But now we’re talking about a difference in culture and way of thinking – I’ll leave this for another day, another blog.

The tagline started out as another one of those hindrances, UNTIL young crane operator showed up today. The exterior brick walls were now finished up to a height of 6 feet high, and the columns, spaced about 10 feet apart are also 10 feet high. This meant the load had to come up over the wall and between the small spaces between the columns, leaving very little room for error. New Guy was swinging stuff all over the place and making it near impossible for the workers to settle the load to get it over the brick walls and between the columns.

Now, keep in mind the tagline IS being utilized at this point because I’m on site watching. After a few loads with New Guy going nuts with the crane, they workers bringing the load in caught on, and it was like watching a miracle – they realized that rope in hand was helping to steady the load made it a lot easier and actually FASTER. That tagline suddenly became very useful. In fact, it became SO useful that about an hour later Kareem found me and proudly presented me with the new and improved tagline. It no longer was just a rope, it was a rope with a spit-shining new D hook on the end, safety latch and all.

At that moment, a trailer was about to get moved and before I could even say something, Kareem ran over, shouted at the workers (I have no clue what he said, but they all seem to listen when he gets worked up—Arabic sounds very angry all of the time), and used the hook to latch the tagline to the trailer. Honestly, this man was BEAMING with pride. Ahmed, the Safety Officer, later came to me and said he’d like to use TWO ropes on the pallets because he thinks it’d be easier. I smile at him, and say he can use 10 if wants, whatever makes the job easiest.

In the days following, Kareem will claim the tagline as his and keep it with his crane. It took a few more reminders, but a few days after this incident, I was over at communication and radio building, looked out across the way, and there it was. It was a site for sore eyes…I hadn’t stopped by Housing yet, and they didn’t know I was in the area, and yet, a load of bricks was up in the air, and there was a beautiful rope hanging down…

Post 8 – Getting tired…

Bricks on the truck -- notice how neatly they start out...



but then they get dumped...


And tossed from the pallet....



On this occassion, Harry and I were able to convince them to STACK the bricks!

No English Hyder and I

My new partner in crime and I in front of an Iraqi Helicopter (perks of working on their airbase)


I arrived at site the other day just as a crane was lifting a pallet full of bricks to the second level of the housing project. The pallet was lifted from a chain hooked to each corner of the basket and came together in the center to connect to the crane hook. The bricks were emptied by disconnecting two of the 4 hooks from the crane and then in one swift motion, lifted the two connected ends, raising the pallet a few feet off the 2nd floor slab so that all the bricks could fall out onto the slab and then swinging the crane around and lowering the pallet back down to ground level. So of course, the quantity of useable bricks halved as most of them broke into smaller pieces from the fall (these aren’t the bricks you find in the US. They are about double the size, yellow and are almost guaranteed to break if dropped).

Perhaps I should degress for a moment to provide for you the full journey of the bricks. The bricks come very neatly stacked on a flatbed or dump truck. There are about 10,000 bricks in one load. As I mentioned previously, these bricks are not as sturdy, and much more brittle than the smaller red bricks we are accustomed to. The typical method of unloading the already fragile bricks is to raise the bed and let all the bricks crumble down to the ground (see photo). Then, the Nepalese, in their blue jumpsuits, scurry over and begin loading the pallet by tossing the bricks one by one into the pallet. It is not long before there are 5 or 6 Nepalese at work, creating a shower of bricks directed into the same pallet. If you can imagine this, then it is not hard to imagine how many of those bricks are broken before they even reach the 2nd level of the barracks where they are intended to go.

Next, they are dumped onto the second level floor slab in the manor I’ve already addressed—using the crane and pallet. From here, the Nepalese take over again. The shower of bricks comes alive again as the now, mostly broken, bricks get tossed into a wheel barrel, brought over to one of the bricklayers, and just as with the dump truck and pallet, the wheel barrel is tipped forward to allow the bricks to roll over one another as they arrive at their final destination, by their brick layers feet.

If you could not imagine the mess before, I hope that now it is not hard to envision how many usable bricks are left from the once neat stack of bricks that has now been dumped from a height, tossed, dumped from a height, tossed and dumped from a small height.

This is an argument had with No English Hyder during every truck delivery. “Bring the bricks already on a pallet and therefore no dumping or tossing is needed! You can lift the bricks directly from the truck to the second level with the crane.” Harry and I have both been saying for weeks now. On some occasions, we do get them to at least stack the bricks between each process instead of tossing them into a heap. This success story usually lasts a few days and then it goes back to dumping and tossing. And the suggestion of a pallet already under the bricks on the truck seems to be a lost cause.

Alas, one must pick and choose one’s battles. And today, this is not the battle I which to take on. Today the focus is the crane.

And so I end my tangent here and return to my initial conversation—the bricks have just been dumped from the crane in one swift motion of releasing two sides of the pallet and lifting the load…
As with the bricks, this was not a graceful process either. The motion of lifting the load up quickly to unload the bricks and swinging the crane around and down to the ground gives the empty pallet just enough momentum to swing wildly in the air the whole trip. To add to the scene, there was no tagline (which is simply a rope hanging off the load or pallet so you have something to grab and control it by). This is the 5th or 6th day in a row that there has been no tagline and as a result the brick filled pallet and empty aftermath have danced freely in the air, daring anyone who got too close.

This is the battle I have chosen to fight—the tagline.

I recognize I’m complaining about a rope. But it makes crane work a HELL of a lot easier and safer, and on top of that, it’s the fact that it shouldn’t be an issue at all; this is merely because the QC (No English Hyder) is being lazy and thinking if he just ignores me, I’ll eventually give up.

I’ve grown weary, but of patience, not the desire to give up.

So when I addressed the lack of a tagline that day, he told me, unfortunately, something that I have heard many times before, “Tomorrow, I promise.” It was a Thursday, which means they are off tomorrow. I say, “You will have a tagline by Saturday or there will be a letter written to your company recommending you stop work for non-compliance.”

So, when I showed up today (Saturday) and the first thing I see was the pallet dangling from two hooks again and no tagline, I was annoyed, to say the least (but not surprised).

I head directly to No English Hyder, my stride revealing my mood, and before I could say anything he spits out, “the truck with materials is at the gate, and the rope.”

“Good, so if I come back after lunch there will be a tagline on that pallet.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, yes, I promise.”

“Today? Because I’ve heard this before.”

Hyder closes his eyes, bows his head slightly, and cups his hands together as he says, “Yes, but I promise this time, and when I promise, I promise-- it is true.” To add emphasis, Hyder shakes his cupped hands towards me each time he uses the word, “promise.” To be honest, I’m impressed he didn’t end with “en shala.” (If God Willing).

“Ok, when I come back from lunch, I expect to see a tagline. If I there isn’t, then I’m reporting to my boss, he will stop the work and there will be a letter of non-compliance written to your company.”

“Well, you see, the rope, maybe not coming today. I am not sure, but tomorrow, yes.”

“So…you lied to me, Hyder. The rope is not coming.”

“Yes, but tomorrow, I PROMISE.”

“No, not tomorrow, today.”

“But you see, not sure, maybe difficult to get—“

“It’s a rope, Hyder. No, it’s not difficult. You have a truck, and there’s a True Value on base. There’s a Home Depot on base. Andalus (the contractor) has a camp with supplies ON BASE. Go to any of those and I promise you, you will find rope for a tagline.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Don’t “yes me” – go get a rope.”




I also had men standing on barrels instead of ladders as another issue today, but I won’t go into that.

After lunch, Mike (my new truck buddy—he just came back from R&R and is helping out while Harry is gone) takes me into the PX and buys rope. It may appear that I am not helping the situation by buying the rope they should provide themselves. However, according to Mike, showing up with a rope will HIGHLY embarrass the managers on site – Ahmed (Safety Officer), No-English Hyder and Abu Ali (the site engineer).

Mike was absolutely correct. Abu Ali is actually angry. It is taken as an insult. By providing them rope, I have just said, “I got this because you have failed and are not capable of doing it yourself.” Mike says they’ll have a rope the next day due to embarrassment. Especially since a 25 yr old FEMALE provided them the rope.

…

Again, Mike was absolutely right (I really hope he’s not reading this—or stimulating Mike’s already confident head is not my intention here!) I arrived on site Sunday before the workers and waited for them to show. When the bus pulled up, Ahmed got off and had a bag full of colorful webbing. “Gift from Hyder,” he said. AND he also had a HUGE rope for a tagline!

I showed Ahmed what to do with it and watched the workers successfully use the rope for the rest of the day.

I was absolutely GIDDY. As small as this may seem, this was a breakthrough! When I got back to the office, I told Rob (one of my co-workers) the story. He smiled at me, congratulated me, and then asked, if the crane was certified, was it set correctly and on level ground when in use, is the operator certified, is it hydraulic of friction…etc…? I had zero answers.

… Yeah, I’m still a sucky QA. But a sucky QA that now has a colorful bag of webbing and workers that use a tagline! WAHOO!!!