Remembering the Kuwait Oil Fires. I specifically remember Boots & Coots being the company taking the lead in trying to cap the 900 or so oil wells that Saddam Hussein blew up as his troops were leaving Kuwait. These are the folks I alluded to yesterday. When faced with the task of shutting down the wells, they applied Texas “hit it with a big hammer – if that doesn’t work hit it with a bigger hammer” approach. They figured they were the only ones with the skills to do the job, and they would kill one well at a time, and it was going to take years. Carl Sagan was preaching global cooling doom and gloom – that the smoke was going to cover the world and cause a global winter and mass starvation as crops failed.
Enter a couple guys from Hungary with no credentials in fighting oil fires. They mounted a jet engine on a truck, backed it up near a well, fired up the engine and thrust of the engine blew the burning oil above the wellhead sideways and putting out the fire. It took only a few minutes to extinquish a fire instead of weeks. The oil folks then would have to still cap the gushing oil, but that’s pretty matter of fact stuff.
The Wikipedia article mentions some of the followup – Sagan was wrong. The oil plumes did not go into the upper atmosphere, and the clouds washed out the soot in a few days. They used oil eating bacteria on the lakes of oil, and that process was very effective at cleaning up the messes on the ground.
