Probe to determine if Halliburton provided unsafe water to troops

The manager's report was incomplete and inaccurate, the company said.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon's official watchdog will investigate allegations by Halliburton Co. water experts that their company endangered U.S. troops in Iraq by failing to provide safe shower and laundry water.
The most serious allegation came from the company's water treatment manager in the war zone whose internal report said troops and civilians in Iraq were left vulnerable to "mass sickness or death."
A former Halliburton water expert who found contamination at the Ar Ramadi base a year ago said he was told by superiors not to advise the military or senior company officials of his discovery.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who had asked for an investigation, released a letter Thursday confirming the audit from John Crane, the Pentagon's assistant inspector general for communications and congressional liaison.
Gary Comerford, spokesman for the Defense Department's inspector general, said the audit would be among the first two by the inspector general's new office in Qatar.
The audit will "look at everything involved in this issue," Comerford said.
Dorgan, who has held Democratic-only hearings on the water issue, said the risk to U.S. forces in Iraq "should not include behavior by contractors who cut corners and whose incompetence fails to manage a program that is supposed to deliver safe water supplies."
Company report
The internal company report, obtained by The Associated Press, was written last May by Wil Granger, the "Theatre Water Quality Manager" for Halliburton's KBR subsidiary.
The report cited confusion between the military and the company over their water treatment responsibilities, a lack of training and the absence of records that might have provided warnings of contamination.
Despite the author's management position with KBR, the company said parts of his report were incomplete and inaccurate. A company report four months later found no problems in the contractor's stewardship of water supplies for U.S. troops and civilians, and no incidence of illness, Halliburton said in a statement. The company has declined to make either report public.
Granger wrote of the discovery in March 2005 of contamination of laundry and shower water at Camp Ar Ramadi in Ramadi. At the time, the nonpotable water came directly from the Euphrates River.
"This event should be considered a 'near miss' as the consequences of these actions could have been very severe resulting in mass sickness or death," Granger wrote.
The report said company water treatment units "had been on site for a considerable amount of time without assembly" due to resistance from a KBR foreman, who believed if they had been operating, "it would expose his weak knowledge base."
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