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.
"It took billions of dollars and years of work to clean up the mess of Saddam Hussein’s failed scorched earth policy."<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>... still the photos are very thought provoking.
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.<p>He took this photo, and others that are lost in storage somewhere: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/rKlSCcw.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/rKlSCcw.jpg</a><p>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.
For anyone interested in Sebastião Salgado's work, I can highly recommend the documentary <i>The Salt of the Earth</i>[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.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3674140/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3674140/</a>
Lessons of Darkness[1] - Werner Herzog did a moving documentary about the Kuwait oil field fire.<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessons_of_Darkness" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessons_of_Darkness</a>
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.