The
Kuwaiti oil fires were a result of the
scorched earthA scorched earth policy is a military strategy or operational method which involves destroying anything that might be useful to the enemy while advancing through or withdrawing from an area...
policy of
IraqIraq , officially the Republic of Iraq , also known as Mesopotamia, is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert.Iraq shares borders with Jordan to the west, Syria...
i military forces retreating from
KuwaitThe State of Kuwait is a sovereign Arab emirate bordered by Saudi Arabia to the south and Iraq to the north and west. The greatest distance from north to south is 200 km and from east to west 170 km . The name is a diminutive of an Arabic word meaning "fortress built near water." It has a...
in 1991 after conquering the country but being driven out by Coalition military forces (
see Gulf WarThe Persian Gulf War , known also as the Gulf War, the First Gulf War,or often as the Second Gulf War and by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as The Mother of all Battles, or commonly as Desert Storm, for the military response...
).
The resulting fires burned out of control because of the dangers of sending in firefighting crews. Land mines had been placed in areas around the oil wells, and a military cleaning of the areas was necessary before the fires could be put out.
The
Kuwaiti oil fires were a result of the
scorched earthA scorched earth policy is a military strategy or operational method which involves destroying anything that might be useful to the enemy while advancing through or withdrawing from an area...
policy of
IraqIraq , officially the Republic of Iraq , also known as Mesopotamia, is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert.Iraq shares borders with Jordan to the west, Syria...
i military forces retreating from
KuwaitThe State of Kuwait is a sovereign Arab emirate bordered by Saudi Arabia to the south and Iraq to the north and west. The greatest distance from north to south is 200 km and from east to west 170 km . The name is a diminutive of an Arabic word meaning "fortress built near water." It has a...
in 1991 after conquering the country but being driven out by Coalition military forces (
see Gulf WarThe Persian Gulf War , known also as the Gulf War, the First Gulf War,or often as the Second Gulf War and by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as The Mother of all Battles, or commonly as Desert Storm, for the military response...
).
The resulting fires burned out of control because of the dangers of sending in firefighting crews. Land mines had been placed in areas around the oil wells, and a military cleaning of the areas was necessary before the fires could be put out. Somewhere around of oil were lost each day. Eventually, privately contracted crews extinguished the fires, at a total cost of US$1.5 billion to Kuwait. By that time, however, the fires had burned for months, causing widespread pollution.
The byproducts of the
petroleumPetroleum or crude oil is a naturally occurring, flammable liquid found in rock formations in the Earth consisting of a complex mixture of hydrocarbons of various molecular weights, plus other organic compounds.The term "petroleum" was first used in the treatise De Natura Fossilium, published in...
burn caused pollution to the soil and air, and the oil fires have been linked with what was later called
Gulf War SyndromePersian Gulf War syndrome or Persian Gulf War illness is an illness reported by combat veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War typified by a range of medically unexplained symptoms...
. Whether this syndrome has been caused by the oil fires, by chemical attack, or other causes has not been determined, and the longterm environmental effects of the fires have yet to be fully understood.
During Operation Desert Storm, Dr. S. Fred Singer debated
Carl SaganCarl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, astrochemist, author, and highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics and other natural sciences...
on the impact of the Kuwaiti petroleum fires on the
ABC NewsABC News is a division of American television network ABC, owned by The Walt Disney Company. Its current president is David Westin.-Current programs:* America This Morning* Good Morning America* Good Morning America Weekend Edition...
program
Nightline. Sagan said we know from the nuclear winter investigation that the
smokeThis article is about the substance. For other uses, see Smoke .Smoke is the collection of airborne solid and liquid particulates and gases emitted when a material undergoes combustion or pyrolysis, together with the quantity of air that is entrained or otherwise mixed into the mass...
would loft into the upper
atmosphereThe Earth's atmosphere is a layer of gases surrounding the planet Earth that is retained by Earth's gravity. The atmosphere protects life on Earth by absorbing ultraviolet solar radiation, warming the surface through heat retention , and reducing temperature extremes between day and night...
and that he believed the net effects would be very similar to the explosion of the Indonesian volcano
TamboraMount Tambora is an active stratovolcano, also known as a composite volcano, on Sumbawa island, Indonesia. Sumbawa is flanked both to the north and south by oceanic crust, and Tambora was formed by the active subduction zones beneath it...
in 1815, which resulted in the year 1816 being known as the
Year Without a SummerThe Year Without a Summer was 1816, in which severe summer climate abnormalities destroyed crops in Northern Europe, the Northeastern United States and eastern Canada.Historian John D...
, in massive agricultural failures, in very serious human suffering and, in some cases, starvation.
He predicted the same for south Asia, and perhaps for a significant fraction of the northern hemisphere as well as a result. Singer, on the other hand, said that calculations showed that the smoke would go to an altitude of about and then be rained out after about three to five days and thus the lifetime of the smoke would be limited.
In retrospect, it is now known that smoke from the Kuwait Oil Fires dominated the weather pattern throughout the Persian Gulf and surrounding region during 1991, and that lower atmospheric wind blew the smoke along the eastern half of the Arabian Peninsula, and cities like
DhahranDhahran is located in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, and is a major administrative center for the Saudi oil industry. Large oil reserves were first identified in the Dhahran area in 1931, and in 1935 Standard Oil of California drilled the first commercially viable oil well...
,
RiyadhRiyadh is the capital and largest city of Saudi Arabia. It is also the capital of Riyadh Province, and belongs to the historical regions of Nejd and Al-Yamama. It is situated in the center of the Arabian Peninsula on a large plateau, and is home to 1,444,500 people, and the urban center of a...
and
BahrainThe Kingdom of Bahrain is a small island country in the Persian Gulf ruled by the Al Khalifa royal family. Saudi Arabia lies to the west and is connected to Bahrain via the King Fahd Causeway, which was officially opened on the 25th of November 1986. Qatar is to the southeast across the Gulf of...
experienced days with smoke filled skies and carbon fallout.
The companies responsible for extinguishing the fires are
Red AdairPaul Neal "Red" Adair was a renowned American oil well firefighter. He became world famous as an innovator in the highly specialized and extremely hazardous profession of extinguishing and capping blazing, erupting oil wells, both land-based and offshore.-Biography:Adair was born in Houston,...
Company (now sold off to Global Industries of
LouisianaThe State of Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state divided into parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...
), Boots and Coots (now Boots and Coots/IWC), Wild Well Control,
Safety BossSafety Boss is an oil well fire fighting company based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.The company and its CEO, Mike Miller , became most famous by becoming the number one fire-fighting company in Kuwait after the 1991 Gulf War. The company doused 180 out of the 600 fires, more than any other company...
, Cudd Well/Pressure Control, Neal Adams Firefighters, and Kuwait Wild Well Killers. All the wells were eventually fully extinguished and brought back under control.
Motives
By the eve of the Iraqi invasion, Kuwait had set production quotas to almost , which coincided with a sharp drop in the price of oil. By the summer of 1990, Kuwaiti overproduction had become a serious point of contention with Iraq.
Some analysts have speculated that one of
Saddam HusseinSaddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was the President of Iraq from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003...
's main motivations in invading Kuwait was to punish the ruling al-Sabah family in Kuwait for not stopping its policy of overproduction, as well as his reasoning behind the destruction of said wells.
Environmental impact
Nearly 700 oil wells were set ablaze by the retreating Iraqi army and the fires were not fully extinguished until November 6 1991, eight months after the end of the war. The fires consumed an estimated six million barrels of oil daily.
Their immediate consequence was a dramatic decrease in air quality, causing respiratory problems for many Kuwaitis. The sabotage of the oil wells also impacted the desert environment, which has a limited natural cleansing ability. Unignited oil from the wells formed about 300 oil lakes that contaminated around 40 million tons of sand and earth.
The mixture of desert sand with the unignited oil and soot formed layers of "tarcrete" which covered nearly five percent of the country. Cleaning efforts led by the
Kuwait Institute for Scientific ResearchKuwait Institute for Scientific Research is an organization in Kuwait which engages in scientific and applied research for several purposes including preserving the environment, serving the economy, advising the government of scientific issues, and others.-History:KISR was established in 1967 by...
and the Arab Oil Co., who have tested a number of technologies including the use of petroleum-degrading bacteria, produced significant results.
In fact, vegetation in most of the contaminated areas adjoining the oil lakes began recovering by 1995, but the dry climate has also partially solidified some of the lakes. Over time the oil has continued to sink into the sand, with as yet unknown consequences for Kuwait's precious groundwater resources.
Popular culture
The fires were the subject of a 1992
IMAXIMAX is a motion picture film format and projection standard created by Canada's IMAX Corporation. The traditional version of IMAX has the capacity to record and display images of far greater size and resolution than conventional film systems...
documentary filmDocumentary film is a broad category of visual expressions that is based on the attempt, in one fashion or another, to "document" reality. Although "documentary film" originally referred to movies shot on film stock, it has subsequently expanded to include video and digital productions that can...
,
Fires of KuwaitFires of Kuwait is a 1992 documentary film directed by David Douglas. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It played in Imax theatres....
, which was nominated for an Academy Award. The film includes footage of the Hungarian team using their jet turbine extinguisher. The Kuwaiti oil fires are also featured in
Werner HerzogWerner Herzog is a German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and opera director....
's 1992 film
Lessons of DarknessLessons of Darkness is a 1992 film by German director Werner Herzog.An effective companion to his earlier film Fata Morgana, Herzog again perceives the desert as a landscape with its own voice...
.
The oil fires and black rain were also featured in the 2005 film
JarheadJarhead is a 2005 film based on U.S. Marine Anthony Swofford's 2003 Gulf War memoir of the same name, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Swofford. The title comes from the slang term used to refer to Marines...
, as well as the video game
Eternal Darkness. There was also a flyover of the oil fires in the movie
BarakaBaraka is a Todd-AO non-narrative film directed by Ron Fricke.The film is often compared to Koyaanisqatsi, the first of the Qatsi films by Godfrey Reggio of which Fricke was cinematographer...
. The Discovery Channel filmed a documentary series about "The Inventors" which interviewed Branko Babic about his Displacement Tube and Counter Pressure Plugs, patent applied for inventions designed to contain the burning oil wells.
External links