Halliburton, the vast Texan oil and military services corporation, was accused by former employees on Monday of supplying contaminated water to American troops and Iraqi civilians at a marine base in Ramadi.
The claims by former employees, who gave evidence to Democratic senators on Monday, was backed up by internal Halliburton e-mails relating to the untreated water and the health problems it had caused in Camp Junction City, as the Ramadi base is called.
”The level of contamination was roughly 2x the normal contamination of untreated water from the Euphrates river,” said one e-mail dated July 15 2005 from William Granger, an employee of Halliburton’s subsidiary, KBR.
In the e-mail, quoted by Associated Press, Granger said untreated water had been supplied to the camp in Ramadi for about a year.
Halliburton, the company once run by the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, has denied the claims of its former workers, and the marine corps said that water quality records for last year showed no sign of problems. Halliburton now runs a water treatment plant at the base.
However, another former KBR employee, Ben Carter, a water expert, said he found evidence of contamination last March and immediately sent an e-mail about the problem to his colleagues.
”It is my opinion that the water source is without question contaminated with numerous micro-organisms, including coliform bacteria,” Carter wrote. ”There is little doubt that raw sewage is routinely dumped upstream of intake much less than the required two-mile distance.”
Carter said he resigned in early April after Halliburton officials failed to take any action. ”They told me it was none of my concern and to keep my mouth shut,” he told AP. ”They brushed it under the carpet … I told everyone: ”Don’t take showers, use bottled water.” – Guardian Unlimited Â