When the Oil Fields Burned | Hacker News Reader

When the Oil Fields Burned

nytimes.com

57 pointsJamilD17 comments

I lived several hours downwind of these fires in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia at the time and remember well the sun being blotted out for weeks on end. You couldn't smell it in the air but the daytime sky was a deep toxic orange, and, it was eerily dim, just like during the moments of a partial solar eclipse. Then the oil slicks and dead jellyfish began covering the beaches and we were told to minimize our time outdoors (obviously). "Being outside is like smoking two packs a day," we were told. The scale of these fires is hard to fathom, but many hundreds of wells were lit. We heard stories of specialized Texan and Louisianan firefighters living through hell and high water putting them out. Bulldozers' steel frames were insufficient to withstand the searing heat when in close proximity to the blazing well heads, not to mention the enclosed cabins being impossible for a human to survive within. Among their methods were to rig controlled explosions to starve the fires of oxygen and to use large metal domes affixed to specialized hydraulic arms to lower them onto the well heads and smother the flames.

Explosives have been one of the traditional ways to extinguish oilfield fires (in addition to techniques like directional drilling to relieve the pressure feeding the fire). My understanding is that in Kuwait there was actually a good supply of water from the Persian Gulf so most of the fires were extinguished with very large quantities of water, sometimes sprayed by gas turbines.

My favorite technique they used to extinguish the fires was to hoist a piece of well casing vertically over the flame, effectively raising it a few dozen feet into the air. Then they'd maneuver the bottom of the casing so the oil spraying from ground level wasn't near the flame, and the fire would be out.

A Hungarian team mounted two MIG21 jet engines on a Russian tank chassis and sprayed water through them.

Concept was called "Big Wind". Here it is in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Ss3BMrscE

"It took billions of dollars and years of work to clean up the mess of Saddam Hussein’s failed scorched earth policy."

i'm not sure how this makes sense. the whole point of scorched earth is to create exactly this kind of cost and requirement for work.

i'm also pretty sure it would be more heroic if it wasn't that this whole operation was paid for. its not people doing something nice off their own backs... its people doing their jobs - however heroic or awesome it is to behold from the outside, they are doing what they need to do and what they were trained to do in order to collect their paycheques.

you might think its amazing that they didn't quit, but I'd hazard a guess that these guys knew at least a bit what they were getting themselves in for and were being suitably compensated for the extra difficulties of the job.

... still the photos are very thought provoking.

I find myself thinking this, from time to time. It's easy to look at a mixed-martial arts fighter, or coal miner, or sweat-shop textile factory worker, or a drug dealer and say: "why not do something less dangerous?"

But the reality is that for many people a safe career is not an easy or even realistic choice. If your options are to live in a ramshackle apartment, never own a car, not have enough money to get married, send your kids to school, bury your family members, or retire, it's harder to turn down a more lucrative and more dangerous career.

I can't pretend to know the motivations of all of the workers, but I am sure that at least some of them made the decision to sacrifice personal health and safety for their future, and their families future, which I think is a reasonable definition of heroism.

If you don't have much of an education, danger often pays.

I'm not sure to what degree I'd put oil rig worker (or even oil firefighter) in the same category as those. A couple of them of pretty much winner take all jobs and a couple are probably "don't have much of a choice" jobs if you live in certain locations. Oil jobs tend to be pretty well-paying blue collar in return for long hours/physically demanding work, week+ on/off schedules, and some level of increased risk (which seems to be concentrated in new workers).

I don't really disagree with your basic point though. I actually worked as an engineer for an offshore drilling company out of school. And, yes, I'm sure there were dangers that the average SV programmer doesn't have but it was good job, paid well for the time, and I only had one relatively minor job-related injury.

The goal of scorched earth is typically to create a military advantage or cause lasting economic damage. The fires didn't keep the Iraqis from losing the war badly, and Kuwaiti production was back up fairly rapidly, so in those respects it failed.

I remember at the time respected people in the industry were saying it would take some crazy amount of time to put the fires out - you'd read estimates like twenty years and think "how is that even possible?" Turns out it wasn't.

Saddam was trying to win a war, and in that he certainly failed.

When you see the men completely covered in crude oil, remeber it is this stuff

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/that-time-...

My dad was over there, and I've been told that he appears a couple of times in the background of the 'Fires of Kuwait' documentary, although I never could pick him out.

He took this photo, and others that are lost in storage somewhere: http://i.imgur.com/rKlSCcw.jpg

I don't have negatives, or any copies of other pictures, and I've never gotten around to finding a place to do large-format scanning to digitize it properly.

Fire of Kuwait on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L77BSBKvMJk

Thank you!

He is the fellow in the back, with the clean shirt and the silver hard-hat, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L77BSBKvMJk#t=27m22s

For anyone interested in Sebastião Salgado's work, I can highly recommend the documentary The Salt of the Earth[0] directed by Wim Wenders. He's done much amazing, gripping photography on ecological catastrophes and the people affected by them, and quite a bit of great nature photography as well.

[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3674140/

Lessons of Darkness[1] - Werner Herzog did a moving documentary about the Kuwait oil field fire.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessons_of_Darkness

Amazing photos. There's a good documentary on this too called Fires of Kuwait. The firefighting companies like Red Adair, Boot and Coots, and Safety Boss did a really impressive job and learned a lot about extinguishing fires in the process.

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