Word: projectable
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Just a few miles up the road is the biggest gift of all: a $128 million hydroelectric-dam project that when completed will provide enough power to light 1.7 million Afghan homes, for about a quarter of the population. It has some 200 immediate job vacancies that could provide income to hamlets like Madin's and plant the roots of a thriving community. But the Taliban prevents potential workers from even approaching the dam site. Shervington believes he needs at least another 100 troops to drive out the insurgents in his area, but foreign forces are already stretched thin...
Sixty years ago, the U.S. government embarked on a massive reservoir and irrigation project and dammed the upper reaches of the Helmand River. In 1975 the Americans started the second phase, building a powerhouse and installing two 16.5-MW turbines at the dam's base. At the time, the dam provided enough power to light up the country's southern provinces, but they left room for a third turbine in the powerhouse and laid the groundwork for an even larger power station nearby that could bring the total energy capacity of the Kajaki Dam project up to 150 MW--nearly...
...Soviet Union invaded, and the American project came to a halt. Decades of war and neglect ensued, and the power plant fell into disrepair. By the time U.S. engineers returned to the powerhouse in 2002, it was squeezing out just 3 MW, and even that only because of the efforts of the head Afghan engineer, Rasul Baqi. He and the few remaining engineers improvised, hammering crude approximations of broken parts out of scrap metal and piecing together electrical lines with barbed wire. He never missed a day of work, he says, not even during the worst of the fighting, when...
...says Mark Ward of USAID, "is a critical element in our support for Afghanistan, because it will provide the electricity to drive private-sector growth in Helmand and Kandahar." If Helmand were a country, it would be the fifth largest recipient of USAID funding. The dam is its star project...
...because the Taliban controls the only road leading into Kajaki, all the equipment and all the labor have to be flown in by helicopter. John Shepherd, who manages the project for the Louis Berger Group, which was contracted by USAID, says he would be ready to push the start button today if it weren't for the security problems. His warehouse in Kabul is packed with hundreds of crates of equipment that have to be transported to Kajaki, along with some 300 tons of cement. It would take a convoy of trucks just a few days to bring the materials...