Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 10, 1991 TAG: 9104100526
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-5 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
The Kuwaitis could only guess what Saddam Hussein had done to their drinking water.
Edwin "Pete" Cox III, president of a little-known Virginia chemical laboratory, said water distillation plants were vandalized, but surprisingly little was done to contaminate the water supply.
The Richmond-based Commonwealth Laboratories Inc. has been entrusted with making Kuwait's water safe to drink.
"There is no evidence of sabotage," Cox said upon his return recently from a three-week stay in Kuwait. "I was prepared to find some awful things. The water, except for the Iraqis' destruction of the production capacity, does not reflect the Iraqi presence."
Cox and five other scientists from Commonwealth Labs are testing the water for traces of mustard gas and the toxic extract of botulism. The other scientists are staying in Kuwait for the remainder of the contract, which runs out May 25.
Although the analysis is not complete, "I will tell you the water was a lot better than I thought it would be, and there was no evidence of sabotage, mustard gas or botulinum toxin," Cox said.
Kuwait stored roughly 1 1/2 billion gallons of water in massive tanks underground, he said. In addition, the Kuwaitis had four major distillation operations: at Doha Village in the north, ports at Shuwaikh and Shuaiba, and Al-Zoor near the Saudi Arabian border.
"This is where the Iraqis did a number on," Cox said.
They took all the monitors from the computers and tried to use them as television sets, he said. They cut off all the plugs because electrical hardware was in short supply in Iraq.
"They then ripped out all the wires because they used them as rope and string," Cox said. "In one place, Shuwaikh, they so destroyed and booby trapped it, it will never be brought on line again. That whole electrical generation system and that whole distillation system is destroyed.
"When they destroyed something, there was no pattern to it," Cox said. "They would just take an ax and beat it up."
Under the 90-day contract with Kuwait, worth $432,000, the first order of business was to develop a method of analysis and organize a makeshift laboratory.
"We needed a method of analysis that could be performed in a laboratory that would have been set up the day before in a garage, rather than a nice, clean laboratory," Cox said. "We envisioned that this laboratory would be set up with its own power, it would have water with an unknown quality."
He said they went on the assumption that they would have no place to sleep and nothing to eat. They assumed correctly.
The team of scientists arrived in Kuwait around midnight on March 16.
There was "filth everywhere," he said. "Garbage hadn't been moved since August. Everybody had a tommy gun, and everybody had a roadblock.
"We ended up sleeping on the concrete floor in the basement of a warehouse that was used to store schoolbooks," Cox said. "From then on, we just started analyzing the war."
At the height of the bombing, Cox said, no water was being produced. Now, the Kuwaitis are up to about 50 million gallons a day. The target is 100 million gallons, one-third of the amount they were producing before the Iraqis invaded on Aug. 2.
"They're running against a fire wall, which means something's going to break," Cox said. "You know the Iraqis didn't maintain it but so well. They're running horribly understaffed, and there's no scheduled maintenance. Right now, they're fixing it if it breaks."
Commonwealth Labs, founded in 1959, employs about 40 people in Richmond, Harrisonburg and Greenville, S.C.
by CNB