(ROARING FLAMES)
(ROARING GROWS LOUDER)
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1990, peace in Kuwait was shattered
by the expansionist plans of their neighbor, Iraq.
(CROWD CHEERING)
(GUNSHOTS)
On August 2nd, Saddam Hussein sent 100,000 troops
across the border, announcing that Kuwait had ceased to exist.
My country's under occupation. My people are suffering,
and I appeal to you again for your assistance and help.
This will not stand. This will not stand,
this aggression against Kuwait.
NARRATOR: When sanctions and negotiations failed,
the United States led a 32‐nation coalition against Iraq
in Operation Desert Storm.
MAN: Force will be used suddenly, massively
and decisively.
(EXPLOSIONS)
NARRATOR: After six weeks,
Iraq's occupation forces collapsed.
In a final act of vengeance, Saddam ordered the detonation of
almost 700 oil wells.
War leaves Kuwait devastated. Its people scattered,
a whole network of modern facilities in ruins.
Emergencies in every sector of society demand response.
(RADIO CHATTER)
In oil fields, you prepare for accidents, even for disaster.
But who could have prepared for this?
Six days after liberation, a small group of firefighters
arrived to assess the task ahead.
‐Mellow, Mellow, this is Johnny. ‐SOLDIER 1: Can you tell me
‐exactly how to get to 25‐02? ‐SOLDIER 2: Yeah, go down
to the second gear rig center, there's old bombed tanks
follow the road all the way back in.
NARRATOR: Five million barrels a day going up in clouds of
poisonous smoke and soot.
If left alone, the fires could burn for 100 years.
MAN: It's not just darkness as you imagine darkness,
and there were lots of days for a long, long time that were
absolutely black.
MAN 2: Everywhere you looked, there was a burning well.
Everywhere you looked was nothing but destruction.
And when you could see the sky,
it didn't last but a few minutes
and then it'd be total darkness again.
I went back home,
I tried to tell him what I'd seen on the trip.
What we'd be up against, what they would need to expect.
And then I told him,
"There's no such words that I know
"that will explain what you're fixing to go into,"
and I couldn't describe it, what I'd seen.
I could not. There's no words around to describe what we saw
when we came here in March.
(FIRE ROARING)
NARRATOR: Thousands of Iraqi mines and coalition bombs lie
unexploded in the soft sand around the wells.
Disposal teams creep through the dark days,
searching them out.
There's only a handful of oil field firefighters in the world
and no one is certain how long it might take.
Some say five years. Some say ten.
FIREMAN: Let's get it out of here and then we'll go to work.
NARRATOR: From 40 countries come 10,000 people
and thousands of tons of machinery.
It's the largest non‐military mobilization in history.
They start at the beginning, rebuilding the roads.
On the edge of the oil field, there's a big deposit of a clay
called gatch, fine and dense. It will sit on top of
the oily sludge without absorbing it.
Thousands of tons of gatch build hundreds of miles of roads,
one to every fire.
Pipelines useless now, stretch from every well and field
to the coast.
Why not reverse them?
Instead of taking oil to the coast,
bring an ocean of water to the middle of a desert.
Saddam Hussein built this pipeline to flood the shore
with oil, and create a wall of fire
against a coalition invasion.
Now, it too carries water to dozens of reservoirs
and fills them with million gallons each.
The direction of the wind is the key to the assault on the fires.
With the wind pushing the heat away,
bulldozers can move water pipes
and monitor sheds to within nozzle range of the fire.
Staying upwind at 2,000‐degree heat
is a matter of life and death,
but even here, you'll sweat a quart an hour
and 12 hours is an average day.
When the water lines are ready,
the team will cool the superheated ground
between them, and the fire they've nicknamed Rita.
The firefighters' toolbox stands by,
with eight heavy equipment operators
to support the four professional firefighters
who make up the core of each team.
Morning.
Morning. I got some good news for you.
Old LeBeau and Angie had a baby boy.
‐All right. ‐All right.
‐You have another firefigther. ‐I mean to tell you.
Looks like you got everything right here.
The dirt work, water.
You're gonna dig with your backhoe?
We're gonna work on the backside.
We've got a drain cut.
We're gonna work on it a little more.
I'm gonna work on that big pile on the back with my rig.
Okay. Well, I'm gonna get out of here.
Hot as it is, I'm gonna check on Paul.
I'll be back in a while.
‐Okay. ‐Okay.
NARRATOR: The attack begins with
a barrel of C‐4 plastic explosive.
Unburned oil is solidified, building up a hard
cap of coke over the wellhead.
The C‐4 will blast it apart.
(ENGINE RUNNING)
MAN: If people would just think
of explosives as an expedient tool.
Does a lot of work, has a lot of energy, and it's instantaneous.
And it is pretty safe.
I've never had an accident in 35 years.
Of course, we're violating every safety regulation
ever written, when we use explosives in the fire.
You know, the heat never think it's just one of those things
that... another way to do it.
(EXPLOSION)
NARRATOR: A constant stream of water keeps men from collapsing
and machines from melting.
Everything that might reignite
an extinguished fire must be pulled away.
Only when you've completely cleared
the ground around the exposed wellhead,
can you decide how to attack the fire itself.
Every fire has its own personality,
and requires its own approach.
This fire won't stay out. Time for the stinger.
Its hollow steel spike is forced
down the throat of the well.
Then heavy mud is pumped in to choke off the oil supply.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)
Its simplicity makes the stinger a favorite technique,
but it's only one of many.
(ENGINE ACCELERATING)
At George Hill's fire, the heat is so intense that the men
can't work near it.
A hollow steel Venturi tube will lift the flame up and away
from the men and machines.
MAN: If it's a 30‐foot tube, it'll roughly
move your radiant heat circle back 50 to 70 feet.
And it creates a low pressure at the base of that tube,
it's unbelievable. It'll take your gloves off your hands.
You gotta be careful, it'll shock your heart out.
NARRATOR: George has decided on an exacting technique.
He'll try putting out the fire by maneuvering the Venturi tube.
MAN: If you got a real hard cross wind, it works better.
We tried it on this one, twice yesterday,
and we never could get it to work.
This morning would be a good time to try.
NARRATOR: Hoses soak the oil at the top of the tube,
forcing the flame down wind.
Water aimed at the base sucked up with the oil,
reducing its flammability. Tilting the tube can separate
fuel from flame for a split second.
(MEN TALKING INDISTINCTLY)
Now is the time of greatest danger.
A steady downpour of oil turns
the whole area into a huge torch waiting for a match.
MAN: Reignition of that fire, when you're not prepared for it,
is probably the most difficult thing to deal with.
It comes so fast, you don't have any warning.
And your personnel are very likely
to just go up as quickly as that well does.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
WORKER: Oh, it's way hot!
NARRATOR: Flames engulfed a Romanian team
in a situation like this.
Natural gas had built up around them
when the well flashed.
At this wellhead, a diverter tube
draws the gas away.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Like oil‐soaked shore birds, human beings can overheat
when their pores are clogged.
You can pass out without warning.
You're trusting your life to the men around you.
But when the wind dies and the site fills with oil and gas,
all you can do is pull back and wait until the weather improves.
MAN: Today, I saw the sun rise for the first time.
We took pictures, as it's the first time
any of us had seen the sun since before this started.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
NARRATOR: By October, teams from the Soviet Union, China and Iran
join in the effort.
French and British crews will bring
the total to 27 teams. The pace of the battle
has everyone improvising.
Foamy One is a Canadian idea.
Conceived and constructed in two short weeks.
It sweeps the vast ground fires
of the world's second largest oil field,
the Burgan complex.
The Hungarians recycle the Russian T‐34 tank to create
a spectacular prototype called Big Win.
They took off the gun turret
and replaced it with jet engines from MiG‐21 fighter planes.
Water is injected into the jet stream.
Then they just open the throttles
and blow the fire out.
Every team in this fight brings its own special strength.
For the Kuwaitis, it is an intimate knowledge of
the reservoirs beneath the sprawling Burgan complex.
Petroleum engineers, Asa Boyabes
and Sarah Akhbar, started the Kuwaiti team.
SARAH: We had a very big motive during this occupation,
to protect our country.
Everybody was trying to do his best,
and we proved that we could do a lot of things.
I mean, it was a process,
like survival to us. Either we fight and become...
the owners of our land or we might as well die.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
NARRATOR: Capping the wells around it has built up pressure
in this fire.
Now it's the largest in the country and a high gas
content is causing almost complete combustion of the oil,
making it the hottest.
SARAH: This is the crust of Burgan.
This the top part of the reservoir.
This is the cream of Burgan, actually being burned here.
NARRATOR: Half the water supply is gone just to cool the site
enough to get close.
Then the Venturi tube
lifts the fire almost out of hose range.
Just as success seems possible, the wind shifts,
driving the heat back on to the crew.
Water vaporizes on the superheated ground,
and the team must fight its way back
through boiling clouds of steam.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)
They'll refill the reservoir, build a second one
and move in again.
(ENGINE REVVING)
This time, the plan calls for doubling the water.
Oil won't burn unless it's hot.
So, enough water just might cool it to a point where the fire
will go out.
SARAH: One of the things special about the oil field,
everybody helps, everybody tries
to find a solution to the problem.
They are here for the same purpose,
putting off all these fires and clearing the sky.
Damn. Wait a minute. Let's put a box on the bottom.
NARRATOR: Texans have been dynamiting oil well fires
for over 50 years.
MAN: We have to get the well in a certain condition
before we can use the dynamite.
It'd be fired remotely after you set up your charges
and everything, you're away from the detonation.
So, it creates a vacuum,
and a fire doesn't have any oxygen to burn on it,
for micro‐seconds.
Therefore, it starves, and it doesn't have anything
to rekindle it.
WORKER: Watch the flame, it's gonna jump.
(EXPLOSION)
All right, stay down. Wait for everything to finish blowing.
All clear.
All right, tell me what we got on monitor 2.
NARRATOR: High torque cuts through steel wellheads
with a high pressure stream of water and guarded dust.
It saved days on each well capping.
Wellheads used to be sawed off by steel cable
stretched between two bulldozers.
Once the bolts are cut, the old wellhead is removed
and the capping assembly can be forced down over the oil flow
in a process called snubbing.
Air pressure from this accumulator will drive
the valves so the well can be shut off remotely.
MAN 1: It's still hard to comprehend and I thought
I had myself mentally prepared for what I was fixing to see.
And you can't look at the countryside,
you can't look at the destruction and the devastation
and the senseless ruination of a country.
You have to look at them on a one well basis.
MAN 2: It's really a little bit more.
It's more of the environment, too,
because it's a global thing.
You're actually helping wildlife, the seas, everything.
It feels better, makes you think about, appreciate
that it doesn't happen like this all the time.
(INDISTINCT TALKING)
NARRATOR: As the smoke clears, the extent of the damage
is revealed. The whole desert ecosystem is smothered under
a blanket of tar for hundreds of square miles.
Oases, once havens for desert wildlife,
now lie under lakes of oil.
Sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide trace metals,
unburned hydrocarbons and salt,
combined with the oil to encrust the trees.
For thousands of migrating birds the journey ended here.
And for the human population, the prospect of poison air,
polluted water and the deadly legacy of war.
MAN: Mines are designed to hurt people,
that's the be‐all and end‐all.
And if there are still mines on the beaches
and people walk on them, somebody is going to get hurt.
(WHIRRING)
SARAH: The desert was very safe for everybody to go, and we used
to enjoy it tremendously.
You can't do that anymore because the environment is
completely disturbed.
The natural pleasures we used to get from our land
we can't get anymore.
NARRATOR: The pain of the past is truly wasted,
if we learn nothing from it.
People from around the world
responded to this environmental assault
with determination and unity.
What experts feared might take years
has been accomplished in just nine months.
The Kuwaiti team will be turning from firefighting
with the process of reclaiming the oil fields.
MAN: You called George? SARAH: Yes, yes, I called George
and he should be on the way with the two packers.
MAN: Okay, we'll try it.
SARAH: Yes.
MAN: But if it doesn't work, you know what we have to do,
we have to come in here.
SARAH: It's not what you lose on the surface,
it's what you lose underground now.
And that's a tremendous amount.
Each and every one is like a patient
that you know very well,
like a human, we deal with them when they have a problem
and we try to solve that problem.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
MAN: The work will not stop.
Our ultimate goal is trying to recover all the wells.
I know that we can do it.
SARAH: Rebuilding process is a real challenge, huh?
This is the first time I worked in such a team.
I know now, teamwork is the best way to go about things.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
MAN: There is no limits to what a human being can do
if the fear inside you is not there anymore.
Humans are put on this Earth not to fight.
You know, people could join forces to build.
And I think that's what all people have learned
all over the world.