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BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The bloody handprints found Monday all over the shiny equipment at Al Ameen, the newly opened electrical substation in eastern Baghdad, were not a cause for alarm. In fact, by letting Iraqis in the poor neighborhood around the station ritually sacrifice sheep there, the American engineers who financed the project may be showing that they are willing to try just about anything to get electricity flowing reliably in Iraq.
The project also shows that the effort to improve the electrical supply in Iraq is finally concentrating on individual neighborhoods, blocks and streets after nearly two years of focusing, with mixed success, on enormous power plants and the high-tension cables that form the backbone of the nation's electrical grid.
The project, the first major substation completed since the invasion in 2003, is a distribution center that will siphon energy from the national grid and spread it around districts like Sadr City, where aging and overloaded equipment constantly breaks down. The station, put into operation with $60 million of American money, will also help cushion the effects of sabotage, letting electricity flow through alternative routes to consumers if part of the network fails.
Generally speaking, Baghdad residents receive electricity for only about three hours at a time. But even that rough schedule is punctuated by frequent blackouts.
Officials at the Electricity Ministry, who signed the papers on Monday that gave them official control of Al Ameen, have long complained that reconstruction has been skewed toward the big power plants and transmission lines, at the expense of the humble network that actually brings electricity into Iraqi homes.
"The power plants, the transmission lines without the substations, it means nothing," said Qais Madalla, a director general at the ministry. Thomas Waters, a civilian with the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which managed the project, agreed, saying, "You can't just keep bumping up the generation without a stable distribution system."
So the reconstruction effort, Mr. Waters said, has turned to the substations in hopes of shoring up the frustratingly unstable network in Baghdad. All the pieces for Al Ameen had actually been delivered to the site by a French and Austrian consortium of companies in 2000 as part of the United Nations oil-for-food program, he said. Much of the construction had also been completed when the Americans and their allies invaded Iraq in April 2003.
But looting of the site followed the invasion. The following year, when the Americans decided to finance the project's completion, they discovered that the consortium would not send any engineers to oversee the work, citing security concerns. The Corps of Engineers contracted the work to Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary, which hired an Iraqi company, F.C.M., to do much of the work.
And there has been a lot of it. The substation is a sprawling network of towers and huge buildings spread over the equivalent of many city blocks, and it has an immense potential for power distribution - roughly 1,000 megawatts, engineers say.
"This is a huge substation," said Howard Holland, Kellogg's project manager for Al Ameen. "You might expect to find something like this near New York City, but you wouldn't expect to find it in Baghdad."
Relying heavily on Iraqis simplified the work and lowered security and other overhead costs, Mr. Waters said.
Khalid Baderkhan, a Kurdish electromechanical engineer who is F.C.M.'s managing director, was careful to hire local residents for much of the labor and explain the importance of the substation to clerics in the local mosques. He was rewarded when the clerics, using the amplified sound systems of their minarets, asked the people of the neighborhood not to disturb the work.
After the station was connected to the grid, Mr. Baderkhan even let local residents kill the sheep, spreading pools of blood at the entrances to important buildings and smearing blood on the big transformers with their hands. The dried blood was still there on Monday.
"Not me," Mr. Baderkhan mumbled, rolling his eyes, when asked if he thought the sacrifices would help. "I don't believe. I have to pretend."
But the bow to local custom was another way of gaining acceptance in the neighborhood, he said, standing beneath the buzzing, 400,000-volt high-tension lines that bring power into the station.
Over all, said Faris Naum, an engineer with F.C.M., the station as it is operating now can in theory distribute about a quarter of the 4,000 megawatts of electricity now being generated in Iraq.
It should also help keep older stations from failing.
"All of the stations are already heavily overloaded, and they are obsolete," Mr. Naum said. When those stations fail, he said, they can cause a crash of the system that blacks out all of Baghdad.
By James Glanz
New York Times