Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 17, 1991 TAG: 9103170236
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B/1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVE MONTGOMERY FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
On another day, farther north, oil well fires near the Iraqi border resembled tiny matches as they first came into sight on the distant plains in late afternoon. A motorist driving north first could see two or three, then 10 and 15, then 30, then 45 - curling, layered shades of gray smoke billowing into white clouds thousands of feet high.
In southern Kuwait, in the Greater Burgan oil fields, the scene was a vision of hell. Flames churned above a narrow oilfield road, accompanied by blinding smoke so intense that an engineer driving a carload of journalists veered into blazing patches of oil along the shoulder before regaining control.
More than a week after the last Iraqi troops fled north in headlong retreat, liberated Kuwait is literally encircled by fire - perhaps the most lasting legacy of the seven-month occupation by troops of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
"Even Satan himself would not do such a thing," lamented Ayad al-Kandari, a Kuwait Oil Co. engineer who had watched from his rooftop as Iraqis torched the oilfields, igniting one explosion after another. "What kind of hearts do they have?"
By almost any measure, more than 500 oil well fires raging out of control would be an environmental and economic catastrophe of monumental proportions. But the fires and their likely impact have been largely overshadowed by the allied victory over Iraq in the Persian Gulf War.
Aside from the $35 million to $50 million lost to Kuwait each day in oil revenues, the fires pose an environmental problem that scientists will be trying to gauge for years. The Worldwatch Institute, based in Washington, estimates that in a year the burning oil could produce about 3 million tons of sulfur, a principal component of acid rain.
Most scientists say the fires are not likely to affect global climate by darkening the skies sufficiently to lower temperatures worldwide. But some fear that soot-induced cooling could disrupt the monsoon rains crucial to agriculture in the Indian subcontinent.
"I've never seen anything like it, because there's never been anything like it," said Raymond Henry, executive vice president for the Red Adair Co. of Houston, one of four Texas firefighting firms brought in to extinguish the fires. "The individual fires aren't any worse than some of the individual fires I've seen around the world. But it's the numbers that are staggering."
The firefighters said in Kuwait City that the disaster is worse than expected, and they predicted that it could take two years to extinguish the fires, affecting more than half of Kuwait's approximately 1,000 wells.
Witnesses and firefighters describe a burned-out shell of a country and say the firefighters will have to work in hellish conditions.
Whenever the weather takes a nasty turn, smoke from the Burgan oil wells in the southern half of Kuwait turn day into night. Plants, trees and grass are struggling to survive.
Normally, this would be the approach of spring, but the oil-laden cloud cover shrouds the country in unseasonably chilly weather and near-perpetual gray skies. Everything underneath the cloud cover - cars, houses and the ground - is peppered with tiny black flakes.
"Normally, you could go out in the country and find flowers on the road, green in the trees," said the manager of a Kuwait City hotel. "But now you see no green in the trees, no flowers. It's a very, very awful thing they have done."
In much the same way as constant rainfall in a region can contribute to an above-average suicide rate, the pervasive gray backdrop intensifies the collective depression of a people already victimized by murder, torture and mass destruction inflicted by their Iraqi occupiers.
The atmosphere can change almost without warning - and from location to location. On a typical day recently, dawn over Kuwait City seemed to promise clear skies, but the natural order shifted into reverse and the day got darker instead of lighter.
By noon, a grayish haze shrouded the city. As a motorist drove south toward Saudi Arabia, toward the oilfields, the sky became increasingly darker, as though a fog had descended. Skyscrapers and overpasses a half-mile away were barely visible. Headlights came on and windshield wipers began flicking away droplets of oil.
A few miles south, and only about 20 minutes later, the southern sky looked like twilight with a storm approaching - similar to the dark, leaden stillness that descends just before a Texas tornado.
Columns of smoke drifted upward to the west, but they were barely distinguishable against the gray sky. For a few minutes, the noontime sun appeared overhead. But, encased in the dark haze, it looked more like the moon - a yellowish circle that radiated little light.
Perhaps the most gripping evidence of the environmental impact of the well fires is near Al-Ahmadi in south-central Kuwait, a once-vibrant oil company town surrounded by wells in the rich Burgan field.
The town, which had a population of more than 100,000, has been deserted since Saddam's henchmen ignited the fires in their scorched-earth campaign.
Security guards posted at a checkpoint near the city limits wore masks to protect themselves from the potentially dangerous fumes and oily residue that falls from the sky.
"It used to be a pretty city before all of this," al-Kandari said as he drove a group of journalists on an inspection tour. "It was all green, with pretty trees and flowers."
Now it resembles a ghost town, with broken glass, boarded-up store fronts, and streets littered with abandoned Iraqi tanks and overturned military vehicles. What was once Al-Ahmadi's green space - lawns and esplanades - has been repainted greenish black by a layer of soot. A pillar of smoke rises in the distance behind a mosque, its white roof now speckled black.
The fires first became visible just past downtown as al-Kandari headed south and turned onto an oilfield road, past a burned-out Iraqi T-52 tank.
"Get your cameras ready; we're going into action," the engineer told his journalist passengers.
The panorama through the car windshield resembled what al-Kandari described as a "nuclear winter" - a flat lifeless terrain covered by black scrub brush, black wild grass and black ponds of oil that resembled small stock tanks.
Fires churned from every direction - some reaching straight up like an acetylene torch, others shooting flames parallel to the ground.
The thick dark-gray smoke sometimes concealed the flames, spiraling upward in varying patterns that resembled mushrooms, funnels, columns and steam puffing from a locomotive.
Outside the car, the air was frigid, with a wind chill possibly as low as the upper 30s because the clouds blocked the sunlight. But closer to the wells, the heat was so intense that it had melted fences and softened the asphalt pavement.
A wall of dense black smoke blocked the road from a nearby well. Al-Kandari tried to go through but was unable to see and veered to the right, into oil flames on the shoulder. Warned by his panicky passengers that he was driving off the road, the engineer struggled to regain control, then backed out and turned around.
Al-Kandari, like thousands of other Kuwaitis, said he felt as though he had been attacked personally as he watched the wells explode.
"It was horrible," he said. "It took years and years to build these wells."
The extent of the damage has stunned even veteran firefighters brought in to quell the inferno.
"There probably hasn't been 500 fires in the last 20 years of this size," said Henry, the Red Adair official. "And there has never been this many in the history of the oilfield at one time."
Other Texas companies in the firefighting effort are Boots & Coots, Wild Well Control and OGE Drilling Inc., all based in Houston.
Although all the firefighters have dealt with multiple fires, none has confronted a disaster approaching the magnitude of the Kuwaiti blazes.
"It's far worse than we imagined," Larry Flak of OGE said after the firefighters flew over the wells.
The companies will bring in more than 200 firefighters to attack the blazes. Many of the wells were blasted below the well-head. So the fires will have to be extinguished by drilling new shafts to intercept the ones that are burning. Mud and water would then be poured into the new shafts, clogging the pipes and extinguishing the flames. The damaged well-head equipment then can be replaced.
Extinguishing the flames, they say, is the easy part. The toughest phase is the preliminary work - hauling in the equipment and bringing in water from the Persian Gulf to cool the flames, allowing firefighters to get close enough to perform their jobs.
The firefighters believe they can complete the job within one or two years, although some acknowledge that the prediction may be optimistic.
"It's kind of like asking somebody who saw the Chernobyl disaster: `Have you ever seen anything like this?' " Henry said. "There hasn't been anything to compare it with."
by CNB