What went wrong with the U.S.-built floating pier designed to get aid into Gaza

Transcript

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

The U.S. military's floating pier on the shore of Gaza cost some $230 million. By the end of that U.S. mission to provide food, water and medicine to Palestinians, critics say it achieved next to nothing. WHRO's Steve Walsh looks at what went wrong.

STEVE WALSH, BYLINE: President Joe Biden announced the mission at his last State of the Union address in March, but at a recent NATO conference, even he was critical of the results.

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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I've been disappointed that some of the things that I've put forward have not succeeded as well, like the port we attached from Cyprus. I was hopeful that would be more successful.

WALSH: Sal Mercogliano is a former merchant mariner who teaches at Campbell University. He says the cost includes a number of Army and Navy ships needed to move cargo and maintain the pier. Since U.S. troops were not setting foot in Gaza, the mission also had to hire local trucks to transport the aid.

SAL MERCOGLIANO: They're actually bringing in those trucks from the beach, loading them on the ships and then turning them around and then bringing them out. That's what makes this very slow and inefficient.

WALSH: Troops were injured while loading trucks at sea. Weather shut down the pier four times. The Army pier system wasn't designed for this kind of sustained use, he says.

MERCOGLIANO: It's designed to replace or supplement piers that have been damaged either by combat or by weather.

WALSH: Convincing the Israelis to work with the U.S. military to open up this special route took an enormous amount of U.S. political energy. Jeremy Konyndyk is with Refugees International.

JEREMY KONYNDYK: I certainly heard that in discussions with the aid workers, that they were seeing just an enormous amount of U.S. diplomatic bandwidth that got diverted to try and make this thing work instead of focusing on other higher-yield operations.

WALSH: The pier was an attempt to work around the problem of most land crossings being closed or being drastically limited, but it never really worked.

KONYNDYK: Things are more or less back to where they were, which is that to deal with last-mile challenges, to deal with aid access in Gaza, the administration just needs to maintain a pretty firm line with the Israeli government about real, tangible actions to facilitate aid delivery.

WALSH: The military hasn't released a breakdown of the cost. The private company Fogbow provided tugboats. Michael Patrick Mulroy is vice president of Fogbow and a former CIA analyst.

MICHAEL PATRICK MULROY: We didn't start off that way, but once the pier was committed and pushed all the way across and the weather states were difficult, they contracted us to be the ones that pushed the pier back and forth - right? - because it broke early on.

WALSH: He says his company circulated plans to build its own sea crossing in Gaza before the U.S. mission was even announced. Despite not having any track record in maritime operations, the company says it has approached the Israeli government to continue using the staging area in Cyprus and the warehouses in Gaza now that the Americans have left.

MULROY: Any maritime corridor that could get food and critical medicine into Gaza, I think, would be a good idea.

WALSH: While announcing the pier would not reopen, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh praised the effort.

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SABRINA SINGH: The temporary pier successfully delivered nearly 20 million pounds of aid, which is the highest volume of humanitarian assistance the U.S. military has ever delivered into the Middle East.

WALSH: The U.S. is now delivering the last 5 million pounds of aid using traditional land routes through the Port of Ashdod, though the underlying problem of how to get enough aid into Gaza to stem starvation remains.

For NPR News, I'm Steve Walsh.

(SOUNDBITE OF KUPLA'S "ENDURANCE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.