Electricity Vs Water

  Oh so that is why we are having a water shortage, guess who. That is right; a terrorist attack at Al-Kazim had resulted in cutting the water off from over half of Baghdad. It is really a depress to come home after a long day in the blazing sun of June and find that you can't take a bath. How does the Average Iraqi deal with such problems? Mostly he will resort to getting from other sources, for example in each house there is a big water tank in the roof, which can be useful if the domestic water is out. Another method, but not so common is to buy water, either bottled or contained up to 20 litters in a container. The last resort is to get a well in the garden, which is actually very easy to do, because there is a lot of ground water in Iraq. All you have to do is to dig a 20 m hole in the ground and there you have it, you just have to make sure the hole doesn't close, so you put a pipe or something. The only problem is that the water isn't really drinkable, although it is healthy, but it is hard for someone to drink such water.

This comes in the same time electricity had gotten better, now we have a 3 after 3 schedule. Which means we get electricity for three hours and we miss it for another 3, and so on. Well I guess one can't get everything at the same time. Come to think about it, it wasn't more than two weeks when we heard that Dubai had a total blackout, which almost stopped life out there, the blackout was no longer than two hours, but it did massive damage because no one was prepared for it. While here in Iraq, the Average Iraqi can easily spend his day without any domestic electricity at all.

  There are many ways to go around the problem of no electricity, the most common one nowadays, is to get your own electricity, by either a small home generator, or a massive area generator which can power up many houses with basic electricity needs. So all you have to do is to sign in, and get a cable that can cover up the distance, and the last solution is to get them both, which we have done in the house. We have a 4.5 KV generator on the roof, which has been secured with chains to the balustrade, cause the only thing you can't steal in Iraq is something you can't move. And we have signed in the local area generator, which is a 500 KV generator. Plus, there are other ways the Average Iraqi would use to get around the electricity problem, like UPSs for computers, and there are some local ones that have been made to run on car batteries, to light up a few things with. Which we have too.

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