David
Wattswas between projects when he got the phone call. It came from a contractor that
Watts—a Krum, Texas-based systems integrator and consultant—had used in previous automation projects. “This particular individual has lots of contacts, and knew that I was a programmer, and he called and said, ‘Hey, there’s an opportunity for a job in
Iraq. Are you interested?’

“At first, I said no,”
Watts relates, to the prospect of taking on a job in an overseas war zone. But when
Watts later called the contractor back, out of curiosity, to find out the details of the assignment, “it sounded like a pretty good opportunity,” he says, and the idea began to grow on him.

FluorAMEC LLC—a company formed between Fluor Corp., Irving, Texas, and London-based AMEC plc to provide services in
Iraq—was in need of a programmable logic controller (PLC) programmer for a major water plant project. The PLCs had already been delivered to the Nasiriyah Water Treatment Plant project, in southern
Iraq, and the contractor could find no one in the area with significant PLC programming experience.

Part of history

Watts discussed the opportunity with his wife and three children. “They were scared for me to go,” he says. But they also agreed that the opportunity to be part of history by helping to build community infrastructure in
Iraq would be a positive experience. So
Watts

Before packing his bags,
Watts reviewed thousands of pages of documents on the project provided by the contractor, and was able to do a small amount of programming work domestically. In mid-October last year, he set out for the job site just north of
Nasiriyah City, in southern
Iraq.

The Nasiriyah Water Treatment plant will replace a much smaller plant in the southern
Iraq region, and is designed to supply about 10,000 cubic meters per hour of fresh drinking water to about 3 million Iraqis. The design calls for four Allen-Bradley ControlLogix PLCs, supplied by Milwaukee-based Rockwell Automation Inc. Three of those PLCs are located in pump stations along the
Garaaf River, a small branch of the
Tigris River. The fourth ControlLogix resides in the control room, functioning as a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) host for the plant. A fifth PLC, a Modicon Quantum from France-based Schneider Electric, has 20 input/output (I/O) drops, and will be used to control the backwash of 20 individual filter cells.

When
Watts arrived in October, work had been underway on the plant for some time, so he was surprised to find the project was not further along than it was. “I was really not expecting to go in there and have to do as much as I did from scratch,” he notes. Programming for the four Allen-Bradley PLCs was only about 10 percent complete when he arrived,
Watts says, though the Modicon Quantum programming was about 80 percent finished.

Machine gun security

Security at the Nasiriyah job site was tight. “We had guys with machine guns around us all the time,” Watts says, including a private security detail supplied by a
UK company, along with Iraqi troops assigned to protect the workers. “You would hear machine gun fire every day and every night, but nothing was really directed at me or at our camp per se, at least that I’m aware of,” says
Watts. Neither did the camp come under direct mortar attack, he says, “though we did have a rocket that was launched over the water plant.” Fortunately, the rocket was a dud, and stuck in the mud near the plant intake, about 200 yards from where he was working,
Watts relates.

The most hazardous part of the job came when Watts needed to visit the three pump stations, which required a drive of some 65 miles over what
Watts calls “a long stretch of dangerous road. When we went outside the camp, we had to wear body armor and traveled in bullet-proof Suburbans.” But again, Watts says he was fortunate, encountering no improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades or other attacks during the nearly eight weeks that he was in
Iraq.

Beyond safety issues,
Watts says the biggest hurdles he faced on the project involved gathering all the information and documents needed, along with occasional problems due to sporadic electrical power in the region. One information shortfall became apparent when the time came to provide communication between the ControlLogix PLCs and the Quantum.

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