Mountains of Trash Grate on Beleaguered Residents of Kuwait City : Reconstruction: Garbage adds to misery in the oil smoke- and sewage-fouled emirate.

KUWAIT CITY —  Before the war, the garbage man came seven days a week here, sometimes twice a day. Put the trash out on the curb, and ma fi mushkileh-- no problem--it would be off to the dump within hours.

Not so since the war.

This postwar city, once among the most fastidious in the Third World, is awash in trash--piles of it, veritable foothills of the stuff in some areas. Only the hordes of mangy cats who prowl the heaps for stinking leftovers seem unperturbed by their presence.

“It’s a pity, you know,” said Omar Yamak, manager of the downtown Plaza Hotel. “Before the war, you cannot find a piece of paper on the street. Now look: Papers. Flies. Mosquitoes, you name it. A pity, truly.”

Outside Yamak’s 19-story hotel, the mound of trash is fast approaching the height of the second floor. If there was snow in Kuwait, you could ski it here on Trash Mountain.

Water, electricity and other municipal services are steadily being restored, reminding residents how far they have come in the five weeks since the Iraqi invaders fled. But it is the accumulating refuse of daily existence--an estimated 4 1/2 pounds of garbage is produced by the average Kuwaiti resident each day--that serves to remind them how far they must go before life in the emirate truly returns to normal.

The sky on most days is smeared with a greasy cloud from the more than 500 oil well fires still burning out of control. The coastline has been fouled by oil and by millions of gallons of raw sewage that continues to pour into the Persian Gulf because waste-water treatment facilities were rendered inoperable during the Iraqi occupation.

However, ask residents what distresses them most about their environment, and it is usually the littered streets and overflowing garbage bins they point to first.

Regular trash pickup halted last August when private garbage collectors ran off the job as Iraqi forces invaded. When the Iraqis retreated in February, soldiers stole or disabled almost every trash truck in Kuwait.

During the occupation, people simply took to burning their rubbish in open fires, a practice that continues today in hundreds of areas around the city. Look up at the sky, residents say. What’s a bit more toxic smoke when the air is already full of it?

Government officials say they are concerned about open burning but, with other pressing problems, can do little more than assure residents that service is on the way.

“We are trying all that we can,” said Ibrahim M. Hadi, director of Kuwait’s Environment Protection Department. Hadi said his agency does not believe that burning garbage and leaving it on the street to rot poses a health hazard--yet.

“Another month, two months,” he said, “we have problems.”

An Illinois-based company, Waste Management Inc., has taken a lead role in trying to clean up the city before then. The corporate giant, which hopes to win a major contract to provide permanent trash service throughout much of Kuwait city, last month brought in 20 Saudi-based dump trucks, 10 steam shovels and 50 laborers to begin scooping up the accumulation.

About a third of Kuwait city’s neighborhoods have since begun receiving twice-weekly trash pickup from both Waste Management and a handful of smaller Saudi-based garbage collection companies, according to government officials.

“I’ve seen worse places,” observed Jorge Villasana, Waste Management’s vice president for the Middle East. “It’s like New York when the garbage collectors went on strike. There are a lot of flies, though.”

Kuwaiti officials say they would like to begin tackling the matter of pest control, but the Iraqis also made off with most of the emirate’s insect-spraying vehicles.

Palestinian and Jordanian residents, meanwhile, complain that trash is not being picked up in their neighborhoods because of who they are. Both groups have encountered hostility among ethnic Kuwaitis as a result of the wartime support thrown Saddam Hussein’s way by Jordan’s King Hussein and Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

“They don’t take our rubbish because they think we are rubbish,” said Mahmoud H. Hussain, 26, who lives in the predominantly Palestinian neighborhood of Hawalli.

Kuwaiti officials deny any favoritism when it comes to trash collection. Sewage is another area of waste treatment in Kuwait that does not play favorites, officials say.

None of Kuwait’s three major waste-water treatment centers is working, and virtually all raw sewage produced in Kuwait is flowing directly into the Persian Gulf.

While the water treatment plants themselves were not destroyed, virtually every office, laboratory and workshop in them was ransacked and, in several instances, blown up, according to officials from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

In addition, some pumping stations that were shut down when the Iraqis invaded have flooded, requiring extensive maintenance. Many sewage pipes, meanwhile, remain broken after being hit by allied bombs or Iraqi explosive charges.

“The system’s pretty much a mess,” said John A. Giachino of the Houston-based Operations Management International Inc., which has been signed by the Kuwaiti government to repair the water treatment network.

A key aspect of the job will require flushing out all of the sewers once pipelines are repaired. It is not a job engineers relish.

Kuwaiti resistance leaders have said they killed many Iraqi troops during the occupation. The corpses of soldiers killed during the day were often stashed in the sewers until nightfall, when they were dragged out and burned in dumpsters and trash piles, according to some Kuwaitis.

“The problem,” said Mary Weber, a damage assessment team leader for the Army engineers, “is that the Kuwaitis sometimes forgot where they put the bodies.”

The average Kuwaiti resident, however, like the typical American, apparently knows or cares little about what is in the sewers so long as his toilets flush. It is the trash on his doorstep that clearly is of growing concern.

“Every day they say they are coming for the rubbish, and every day they do not come,” said Yamak, the hotelier. “This is the center of the city. For so many people to see this casts the wrong impression of Kuwait. It is really very beautiful.”