On The Scene: Water For Umm Qasr

CBS News Correspondent Scott Pelley Travels With The Marines

(CBS)  CBS News Correspondent Scott Pelley is traveling with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Force and filed this report on the battle for Umm Qsar.

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In Umm Qasr, they came running when they heard the word "Water."

There hadn't been any water in more than a week, and so they ran down a road as long and as miserable as a day of thirst.

British and American troops poured the first humanitarian aid into Iraq, buckets at a time. Maj. James Thorpe runs an army unit trying to restore life to Umm Qasr. The first order of business is restoring water.

Why do these Iraqi civilians not have water?

“Basra is the city just north of us," Thorpe says. "That's the location where the drinking water comes from for these folks in Umm Qasr. As it turns out, just before the war started, about four or five days before it did, the water that normally flows down here via truck was turned off."

By who?

“Basically by the ruling party, the Baathist party and, I guess, Saddam Hussein,” he said.

Thorpe's civil affairs team will get the water and power flowing. They want to convince Iraqis that life will improve once their country is liberated.

But a man in the water line told us people are nervous. They think Saddam is coming back - and that means retaliation for those who befriend the enemy.

Make no mistake; this is combat relief aid. It was just two hours ago that there was shooting in this neighborhood. But the Americans and the British feel it is so urgent to reach out to the Iraqi people that they've decided this is a risk they're willing to take.

The British brigadier in charge of the area, Jim Dutton, says the port at Umm Qasr will open in another day.

Humanitarian aid will fill the port, but getting it through to a desperate people is something else. Once you bring the goods into the port, it may be difficult to move things out in convoys.

“The roads aren't completely safe,” Dutton said. "There are still some bad guys out there who are trying to make a point so we're going to have to find ways of distributing it.”

It was not all happiness in the water line. One man said, "I have six children. We have no food or electricity. Why have you done this to us?"

But most were grateful. Before today, almost no one here dared to leave their homes.

“We want to rebuild Iraq,” Thorpe said. “We're going to go to a situation where they are stable, they can take care of themselves in the next couple of months. And we, as Americans, can pull out - and the British.”

A "couple of months" is surely optimistic, but this was a start.

One man filling a jug asked, "Is it all over?" The answer for most of Iraq is certainly no. But in this one town today, there were many steps down that road.