A Killer in the Ranks

Jan 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Tom Zind, Freelance Writer

Non-combat military deaths, injuries, and property damage in Iraq are being blamed on unsafe electrical systems. While electrical pros try to fix the problems, the Pentagon, Congress, and contractors point fingers.

Of more than 4,000 U.S. military deaths recorded in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, two, in particular, have haunted the halls of Congress, corridors of the Pentagon, and boardrooms of civilian military contractors in the past year. But the names of Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth and Staff Sgt. Christopher Lee Everett haven't echoed for the usual reasons.

They weren't celebrities turned soldiers, putting a public face on the war's losses. And they didn't die combating an enemy or selflessly protecting buddies. Instead, they've gained posthumous notoriety for the indignity and incongruity of how they died: by electrocution in the course of doing mundane tasks in a war zone teeming with roadside bombs and insurgent gunfire. Maseth — a Green Beret — was electrocuted in January 2008 while showering in his Baghdad barracks; Everett was electrocuted while powerwashing a Humvee in September 2005.

Their deaths, blamed on improperly grounded electrical systems, have prompted government inquiries into military procedures for addressing non-combat safety issues in Iraq, as well as the competency and reliability of contractors working there. They've also unleashed a multi-pronged military effort to identify and fix dangerous electrical problems that could pose a similar threat to troops and civilians quartered in thousands of structures across that country.

Indeed, nearly six years into the Iraq war and occupation, it's becoming clear that upon entering Iraq, the United States occupied buildings and introduced temporary structures that had problematic electrical wiring. More significantly, it may have been lax in ensuring systems were either installed or fixed by contractors to ensure minimum safety standards. In addition to the deaths of Maseth and Everett, numerous shock-related injuries, hundreds of fires resulting in deaths, injuries, and property damage, and possibly 19 or more electrocutions (click here to see Table) are being traced to problems in facility electrical systems that may have been allowed to fester for years.

Although somewhat expected in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, crude electrical connections like this pose clear safety hazards. (Photo courtesy of Debbie Crawford)

That's the grainy picture that's emerged in the wake of a July 2008 hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee into electrocutions and fires caused by deficient electrical systems in Iraq and reports of internal Defense Department investigations cataloging longstanding problems. While more clarity is expected to emerge from a Defense Department Inspector General's office investigation into the circumstances surrounding Maseth's death, military sources in Iraq concede that soldiers and civilians there have been exposed to inordinate electrical safety hazards.

“We inherited buildings that were built to many different (or even non-existent) codes and standards, and the electrical for much of the containerized housing that came into the country was not installed correctly,” says Maj. Gen. Timothy McHale, the principal staff officer for resources and sustainment for Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) and head of its Task Force SAFE (Safety Action for Fire and Electricity), created last summer to assess, analyze, and correct electrical safety risks on U.S. bases in Iraq. “I definitely think that in the speed and haste of what we've done, in terms of expediting operations here, things went up fast, and quality control was maybe not as good as it should have been.”

The unscrambling begins

As much as the U.S. troop surge of 2007 served to tamp down unforeseen security challenges in Iraq, a surge of attention, expertise, and manpower is now focused on correcting overlooked or neglected electrical safety problems there. With the help of a contingent of at least 100 civilian electrical and fire protection systems inspection professionals, drawn mostly from the United States, the U.S. military is shepherding an effort to inspect some 5,000 “hardstand” buildings and some 86,000 temporary facilities. The effort, begun in earnest last October and slated to last a year or more, is aimed at identifying safety concerns, ranking them by likely imminent danger to the most people, and fixing them accordingly.

By most indications, inspection and repair teams are now working to untangle a formidable mess, with roots in existing and new electrical systems designed and installed to a mix of standards, many of which do not adequately address safety to the same degree as more rigorous codes like the National Electrical Code (NEC). As a result, many are unsafe to varying degrees, especially in light of increased demands and possible overloading after they were occupied — and scattered attempts to jerry-rig subpar systems to meet those needs.

“There's a saying that Iraqi buildings conform to a ‘seven codes, plus one’ standard — seven for the rough number of nations that built the Iraqi infrastructure over the years and applied the electrical codes of each, and the ‘plus one’ being no code whatsoever,” says Col. Jeff Gabbert, commander of the Defense Contract Management Agency - Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan as well as a SAFE member. “In many of the hardstand buildings, grounding and bonding, which of course is fundamental in most codes, is absent or inadequate. We've found many metal pipes with no bonding whatsoever.”

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