Dredgers assigned to Iraq

Among the American companies working to rebuild the war-torn and neglected Iraqi landscape is a Maryland manufacturer that recently won contracts for dredging equipment worth millions of dollars.Ellicott Dredges, a division of Baltimore Dredges LLC, has supplied equipment for projects from Baltimore’s harbor to the Panama Canal and those in more than 70 other countries. It recently shipped its first piece of equipment to Iraq, one of a dozen units in all that will go to the country to help maintain 12,000 miles of waterways. The equipment will remove silt upstream from hydroelectric dams, control flooding on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and maintain irrigation canals and the channels of the Um Qasr port in southern Iraq.