But with the US reconstruction money set to run out, its sustainability is now in question.

The 21 billion dollars of the Iraqi Relief and Reconstruction Fund administered by USAID ends in September, and increasingly emphasis is on how projects will be sustained and managed by the Iraqis when the American money runs out.

"The Iraqis need long-term planning to continue to expand the plant and help keep it running," said Chris Serjak, a supervisory infrastructure officer for USAID, as he showed journalists around the rebuilt facility.

"The older the plant gets, the more that repairs need to be done over time," he added.

The Sharq Dijla plant, the second largest in the Baghdad area and supplying a fifth of the city's water needs, was built in 1979, and is in the midst of a comprehensive USAID-funded 11-million-dollar overhaul implemented by Bechtel corporation.

The plant, which supplies water to eastern Baghdad neighborhoods like Sadr City, Baghdad Jadida, and Adhamiyah, deteriorated in the 1990s because of international sanctions and lack of maintenance.

"Volume might have been high but they were running it through dirty filters," noted Serjak. "The effluent varied in quality."

In the chaos following the invasion, the plant was saved from the looting that affected so much of Iraq's infrastructure when its employees banded together to protect it.

"If it weren't for us, there wouldn't have been any water for Baghdad," electrical engineer and head of maintenance Saad Abed Hassan said with the pride of a 14-year veteran at the plant.

Instead the old plant kept pumping while the Americans expanded its capacity by building a brand new 32-million-dollar treatment plant next to it -- while also refurbishing the old one.

The new plant, which was originally designed and ordered by the United Nations under the oil for food program, was completed in September 2005, but it is working at 60 percent capacity until a new pumping station can be built.

When work is completed by September, the two plants should produce 777,000 cubic meters of water a day -- compared to a pre-war level of 330,000 cubic meters.

Though not quite the plague as intermittent electricity, water remains a persistent problem for Baghdad residents, with low pressure in many neighborhoods forcing people to buy water pumps that further strain the electricity grid.

"The farther away you are, the lower the pressure," said plant manager Saad Salman.

"Pressure has increased over the last years, but not yet what we want." He added that another expansion, equivalent to another new plant, is in the works.

The Americans were originally going to fund that expansion, but as the money ran out the plans were delivered to the Iraqis to implement.

Of the four billion dollars allocated for water projects, nearly half "was reprogrammed in 2005 for other priorities, including security training", according to the US embassy in Iraq.

Security has not been a problem for the Dijla plant so far, though an attack on its counterpart in western Baghdad a year ago left half of the capital without water for days in the heat of summer.

The Dijla plant has two dozen guards from the Facility Protection Service, but Salman says they could use more, with the insurgent-wracked neighborhood of Adhamiyah only a few kilometers away.

The older water plant's cracked concrete buildings house hulking old machinery as well as new recently installed control panels. Decade-old water pumps strain away, side by side with shiny new pumps.

"There was lots of algae growth in the filter beds and throughout the clarifier system," said Serjak until they installed a chlorinating system.

According to Serjak, it was with sustainability in mind that USAID and Bechtel corporation chose the technology for the renovations, preferring easily maintained technology to the most advanced.

"It's the difference between a brand new BMW and a '57 Chevy," said Serjak. "To repair the BMW you have to hook it up to a computer, a '57 Chevy you can fix in your garage."

In the past, USAID projects have run into sustainability problems when the foreign technical experts left and the inheritors of the projects were unable to keep them running.

Serjak explained that USAID has worked with the Iraqi central government to make sure they know how much to budget to keep the plant running and maintained. "They've shown positive signs," he said. "I'm optimistic."

As the tour concluded, plant manager Salman sidled up to a journalist and asked him: "Do you know of anyone who can help us build the rest of our water network?"

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