Too much water

January 22, 2005

You know the kind of day when you just want to stay in your jammies, light a fire and read a book?

The kind of day that is grey and wet, cold and windy — weather that seems to slice through your body to chill your bones?

Today is that kind of day.

And it always seems to be this kind of day that requires us to be out and about.

I wonder why that is.

At Camp Taji, I and countless others splashed through the muck going from place to place. Water doesn’t soak into the ground here. It pools on top, making a gumbo-like soup of sticky mud, rocks and trash.

We’re expected to get a half inch today — equal to the total accumulation of rain for the last 10 months combined — and it’s going to be ugly.

I think I hear the tap of sleet on my window.

Damp and cold. It makes me miss 130 degree weather.

Is that nuts or what?

Adding to the misery of the day is the laughably ironic fact that there is no running water at Camp Taji right now.

We have more water than we can handle falling from the sky — it’s leaking through roofs at Camp Gunslinger, overflowing streets already so flooded with sewage that it runs through the cracks in humvee doors when the vehicles traverse the puddles and making the roads around Camp Taji close to impassable — but we don’t have any water to flush the toilets.

We’ve been on water restriction at Camp Gunslinger for a week now. Showers are limited to every two days and signs dictate that you must run just enough water to wet yourself and rinse. Lather must be done with the water off.

I’m pretty sure everyone is ignoring those instructions. We’re getting pretty sick of combat showers.

We ran out of water three days ago at Camp Taji. Although water trucks arrived to fill the massive tanks by the bathroom trailers yesterday, they were drained by the afternoon.

Did I mention we haven’t had Port-a-Potties in the living areas for months?

It’s pretty nasty.

While you can force flush the toilets by pouring bottled water into the tank, no one seems to be doing it.

Showers? Not even a trickle of water is available for hand washing.

Why?

Well, insurgents blew up a water line south of the 39th Infantry Brigade’s area in Baghdad last week and it’s taking a while to get things fixed.

I’m running out of clean socks ... and other things. No water, no laundry service.

So we’ve started doing laundry at Taji by hand using bottled water.

It’s better than nothing.

But as muddy as my clothes are getting outside, there’s only so much I can do with bottled water and a wash bucket. Instead of clean, we’re going for cleaner than it was.

At Gunslinger, we still have running water, so laundry by hand is possible.

But a few more days of rain outside and dry water tanks inside and Camp Taji’s going to be an utter mess.

But as one soldier said today, at least we don’t have a dust problem anymore!

Posted by Amy at January 22, 2005 03:55 AM