Giant-Screen Film Records Horrors of Kuwait's Flaming Oil

By Richard H. Curtiss

"People putting their lives on the line for the environment is a subject that's really worth risking your life for, which is what...the crew did when making the film."

—Sally Dundas, producer, Fires of Kuwait

Even before U.S.-led coalition forces launched the offensive to liberate Kuwait on Jan. 15, 1991, Iraq's occupying army had attached explosives to virtually every one of the country's oil wells, threatening to lay waste all of Kuwait's oil resources rather than relinquish them. The threat was particularly worrisome because of the gas pressure that distinguishes Kuwaiti wells from most of their American counterparts.

Whereas most wells in the United States pump petroleum to the surface, in Kuwait's northern Rotatain field, and in the Burgan field, the world's second most productive oil field situated just south of Kuwait City, tremendous gas pressure propels the oil to the surface in a steady, high-pressure jet from the moment a drillbit penetrates the oil-bearing strata.

Before withdrawing, the Iraqis carried out their threat. They detonated 696 wellheads, leaving the oil from some pouring into the Arabian/Persian Gulf, and igniting others to cast a pall of smoke over the entire country. Of the detonated wells, 607 were in flames on Feb. 27, the day the war ended.

Once the delirious Kuwaiti welcome for American, Canadian, British, French, Saudi, Qatari, Emiri, Egyptian, Syrian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and soldiers of many other nationalities subsided, the liberators and liberated alike found themselves trapped within a city from hell by the hundreds of square miles of minefields surrounding it. Kuwait City's wide streets were littered with the hulks of stripped automobiles and burned-out military vehicles. All ground-floor shops had been pillaged and vandalized, while retreating Iraqis had pumped shells at random into downtown high-rise luxury hotels and office buildings.

Residents were totally without water or electricity, and more crude oil was being tossed up every minute by waves breaking on the city's mine-covered beaches. Except when the wind blew from the north, the entire city lay under a pall of black smoke that made night and day almost indistinguishable.

When the first American wild-well specialists arrived on aircraft chartered by the Kuwait government only days after a U.S. Marine unit had occupied the airport, they could not believe what they saw. Prior to March 1991, no fire fighters had ever confronted more than three oil well fires at a time, anywhere on the globe.

What surrounded them in Kuwait, however, was a disaster of such magnitude that some scientists predicted the fires would burn for years and set in motion world-wide climatic changes lasting for generations. However, the Kuwaiti government, barely re-established on its own soil after six months in exile in Saudi Arabia, was willing to pay whatever it cost to halt the ecological disaster consuming its petroleum reserves, blotting the sun from its skies, polluting the once sparkling waters and extensive coral reefs of its Gulf coasts, and turning even the air in Kuwait into a long-term health hazard to everyone forced to breathe it.

A Disappearing Desert

Near the flaming oilfields, the desert surface was gradually disappearing under a spreading sea of oil oozing and seeping into ground water supplies. Miles away, a film of oily carbon residue was settling over everything that lived, from the lush palms and oleanders flanking suburban lawns, gardens and municipal parks to the scanty vegetation of surrounding deserts.

The first fire fighters on the scene were from the American Southwest, wearing the jumpsuits and driving the equipment of world-famous U.S. wild-well specialists. But, in the face of the unprecedented disaster, the Kuwaitis eventually hired any company willing to operate in the dangerous environment. Within months, more than 10,000 fire fighters and support personnel from 40 nations were engaged in the immense fire-fighting campaign. It was one of the largest civilian mobilizations in history as the companies involved deployed into the flaming oil fields.

Among later arrivals were a five-person crew normally assigned to the natural history unit of the Imax Corporation of Toronto, Canada, led by cinematographer David Douglas. In addition to recording effects on Kuwait's natural environment, they chose to film the spectacular dangers faced by the wild-well specialists themselves as they worked to contain the disaster before it could blot out the teeming marine life of Kuwait's coastal waters and Kuwait's desert wildlife. The film they produced is a spectacle that is a physical rather than just a visual experience.

This writer was in Kuwait only hours after its liberation. I saw with my own eyes, both from the stricken city where black smoke turned day into night, and from the soot-filled air above, the awful spectacle of 600 oil fires billowing across the horizon as far as my eyes could penetrate the smoke pall.

The fire-fighting campaign was one of the largest civilian mobilizations in history.

But not until viewing "Fires of Kuwait" in the specially designed theater of the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC did I fully comprehend the power behind the roaring, pounding jets of oil and gas bursting from the earth under unimaginable pressure to explode into flames that billowed hundreds of feet into the air while generating temperatures of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Initially, the fires consumed 5 million barrels of crude oil daily, nearly a twelfth of world-wide daily production, and almost as much as total Iraqi and Kuwaiti pre-war production combined. To accomplish the gargantuan task of extinguishing the fires, fire fighters brought in 3,000 vehicles ranging from cranes and bulldozers to frontend loaders.

Innovative crews literally invented new vehicles to accomplish the unprecedented task. A Hungarian fire-fighting team created what it called the "big wind" by mounting MiG-21 jet aircraft engines on a Russian T34 tank. With other vehicles pouring water onto the tank to cool it, the "big wind" moved close enough to train tons of water per second through the jet engines onto a flaming wellhead, literally drowning the flames.

The film takes viewers up close to watch this extraordinary spectacle as well as more traditional snuffing out of the flames by covering wellheads with huge pipes mounted on cranes, and by placing at the flaming wellheads 55-gallon oil drums filled with 250 pounds of explosives. When ignited, the explosions jarred bulldozers off the ground, and created a momentary vacuum that blew out the fires by depriving them of oxygen.

To photograph all of this, beginning at the end of September 1991, the Imax film crew borrowed from the fire-fighting crews of Houston-based Wild Well Control the clothes (ordinary coveralls over long underwear) they wore to insulate themselves from the heat. This enabled the cinematographers to move right up with the crews to place their giant camera where it could record some of the tensest moments as each fire was extinguished.

"Everyone saw television footage and learned about the destruction, but this is the only story that allows the viewer to really understand what it was like there, to experience the magnitude of the fires," film director Douglas explains. "It was horrific, but it was also mesmerizing."

Soot, oil, rain, corrosive smoke and blowing dust and sand combined with the clouds of steam and jets of salt water being pumped onto the fires to test the cameras and equipment, particularly the lenses. "I knew the camera could take more heat than I could," Douglas explains. "So as long as we were still standing, I was certain the camera would run."

For the fire-fighting crews, the moments of greatest danger came immediately after the fire had been extinguished. Once they had doused the flames, the fire fighters had to work at a frenzied pace to remove the sabotaged wellhead and replace it with one that could cap the jet of gas and oil still blasting out of the ground, showering everyone and everything in the vicinity with highly volatile petroleum rain.

Generating a single spark during this procedure, which involved sawing off and replacing the previous heavy metal assembly, could blow up and incinerate the entire crew. This happened to a Rumanian crew working in Kuwait. The work could only be done when the wind was blowing to dissipate the buildup of gas. To shorten this period of maximum danger, crews cut away the old wellheads with a jet of water and garnet sand instead of spending days sawing off the damaged wellheads with steel cables as had been done everywhere before the Kuwait disaster.

Nine fire fighters are believed to have been killed by reignitions, which also were triggered when oil escaping from an extinguished wellhead streamed toward another blazing fire, providing a path up which distant flames could travel to reignite the wellhead. There were other fatal accidents in which vehicles, including one transporting journalists, became lost in the smoke and strayed off makeshift roads into shallow lakes of flaming petroleum along their edges.

Working with a locally recruited crew of Kuwaiti fire fighters, which styled itself Kuwait Wild Well Killers, the film makers recorded another kind of dangerous set-back experienced by the 12-man crews fighting fires throughout the oil fields. The Kuwaitis, one of whom, Sara Akbar, was the only woman among fire crews of all nationalities, were on the verge of extinguishing a flaming wellhead at the very top of the Burgan field, where oil was escaping under particularly high pressure.

Suddenly the wind shifted, turning the flames toward the Kuwaiti crew at the climax of its concerted final attack on the inferno. In a well-rehearsed procedure, the crew conducted an orderly withdrawal, each part of the team covering others with jets of water as they withdrew.

Absolute Dependability

"Crew members must be able to depend upon each other absolutely," the film's narrator, Hollywood actor Rip Torn, explained, as the coveralled Kuwaiti workers emerge from clouds of black smoke bearing the equipment they will use to renew their assault after the wind shifts again.

The film also records other not-so-incidental hazards facing the fire fighters. Before roads covered with a hard clay called "glatch" could be bulldozed into the flaming oil fields, the way had to be cleared of mines. The film pictures a giant mechanism grinding up sand and pounding it with heavy metal blades to detonate explosives. When a mine explodes under the flailing blades, it jolts the huge hybrid vehicle partially into the air.

From the air, the Imax camera, which produces a film 10 times larger than conventional 35-mm motion picture film and 3 times larger than standard 70-mm wide-screen presentations, records the miles of abandoned vehicles, burned-out tanks, blown-up foxholes and trenches, and tons of expended and unexpended ammunition littering hundreds of square miles of desert around Kuwait and stretching deep into Iraq. As the camera zooms in on one chaotic scene of gargantuan litter, the viewer is startled to realize that some of the patches of rags and personal equipment lying among littered shell cases and unexploded cluster bomblets are, in fact, the desiccated bodies of Iraqi soldiers, still unburied or uncovered after burial in the sand by shifting desert winds.

Saddam Hussain's actions in leaving his troops dug in to face certain defeat in Kuwait, and then in instructing them to destroy the country he coveted but could not hold, are almost incomprehensible examples of unfeeling waste of human beings and natural resources. When Iraqi forces invaded on Aug. 2, 1990, Kuwait was among the world's largest oil producers and its people had one of the highest per capita incomes on earth. When Saddam's forces departed Kuwait, its oil wells were emitting 5,000 tons of smoke daily, creating a plume 800 miles long, and half of the country's inhabitants had fled to the four corners of the world.

If the deliberate ignition of two of the world's largest oil fields serves as a stunning example of human destruction of natural resources, the international effort to save the Kuwaiti environment stands as a monument to human ingenuity. The fire-fighters converted 90 miles of oil pipelines, some used by the Iraqis to pour oil into the sea, into a network to pump seawater back into the oil fields for use in the fire-fighting effort. Month by month the number of wells extinguished climbed from an initial one or two per day to a final level of 13 in one day.

In the end, what the Kuwait government accomplished with the help of skilled and courageous experts from around the globe and at a cost of $1.5 billion, in nine months rather than the five years predicted by some experts, will stand as one of the most extraordinary achievements in history. Similarly, this film, capturing with its own awesome technology the sights and, with a six-channel, four-way sound system, the adrenelin-pumping sounds of danger, action and awesome destruction, stands as a cinematic accomplishment to match the grandeur of its subject.

While transporting viewers into the very heart of one of history's greatest man-made disasters, "Fires of Kuwait" also is a riveting depiction of human skill, courage and ingenuity combining to save the planet from the consequences of human folly.

(Washington Report readers interested in borrowing a copy of the videotape may contact the Kuwait Information Office, 2600 Virginia Ave. NW, Suite 404, Washington, DC 20037, telephone (202) 338-0211.)

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.