Friday, January 16, 2004

08:45 - Baghdad. John called Wednesday evening, wanting to know if I’d like to go to Razzaza to see the many pump stations there. Of course, I said yes. I’ve found that it’s tough to improve a system that I’ve never seen up close. Not impossible, just tough to do when all your data is paper, electronic, captured images, or word of mouth. I truly appreciate the site visit. To see, hear, and smell the project. To capture its gestalt and shove it in a small box I keep in my pocket for that very purpose.

If you believe what you read about the pump stations at Razzaza, you might learn that Razzaza wasn’t always a lake. Sadly, it never advanced beyond a depression. Holes in the ground, I have learned, are good places to put stuff. In this case, the Iraqis long ago decided to fill this depression with water, developing a happy, although incredibly saline lake, or buhayrat, or even bahr, which is probably an abbreviated way to say buhayrat, which is probably just an Arabic way of saying depression filled with saline water, only said with one word, instead of lots of them.

The saline water comes from the downstream end of the irrigation process, as the naturally occurring salts in the soil are washed away with the drainage water. It’s kind of like the way I remember the human circulatory system to work. The recollection is modified by close to thirty years of not thinking about the subject, but here goes. Fresh water is pumped from the source river into a main canal, which branches into branch canals, which is branched into secondary canals, distributary canals and water courses. These are like increasingly smaller arteries, moving the precious alcohol, er, oxygen to the various muscle groups and organs.

At the field level, farmers will cut very small canals in and around their crops to perform the final distribution and primary collection (capillary-like activity, but not capillary action) then, on the downstream end of the fields, the collection process begins in earnest, as saline water is routed through larger and larger canals. The problem, though, is what to do with this saline (that’s “salt” for the uninitiated, and those not paying attention) water.

If it wasn’t so saline, the drainage water could be discharged right back into the source river, to be used again further downstream. But this drainage water is far from suitable for use as irrigation water again (if you’ve got doubts, try watering your houseplants with saltwater for the next five weeks), so it would end up polluting the source water, so huge, river-sized drains are constructed to convey the drainage water either to the sea or to huge depressions like Razzaza.

At a couple of points in this system, gravity gets in the way, and pumps are required to lift the water, so that it can flow for a while longer. Some of these pumps can be huge. At Razzaza, for instance, the pumps which finally lift the drainage water into the lake have a design capacity of 35 CMS (cubic meters per second). Whereas thirty five is sort of a small number, it’s really the CMS that we need to understand.

Remember those Jello-brand pudding cups? The ones you toss in your lunch box or snack on during mid-afternoon lulls? Each little can holds about four ounces of pudding. As such, a properly configured pump station could move about 300,000 cans of pudding every second. If you could fit, say, sixty of the convenient four-packs in a shopping cart, this would equate to about 1,250 shopping carts of pudding every second.

Hmmm, maybe the small can of pudding thing is going nowhere. Lets suppose you live in a 2,500 square foot house with those nice nine-foot ceilings. The pumps at Razzaza, if configured for creamy Jello-brand pudding, could fill your house to overflowing in less than 20 seconds. That’s a lot of pudding! And twenty seconds doesn’t give you much time to grab the cats before the advancing pudding flood.

The point being, the pudding is wasted and your rugs will never get cleaned. Not dissimilar to Razzaza, where the water is wasted, and the lake is sort of a pit (I guess “pit” means “depression”, too, but in this case I meant “pit” as in “dump”).

As it turns out, I didn’t get to tour the site. Our mission got scrubbed during the ride down there, so we came back to the palace.

It was a sloppy day, anyway.