Saddam's "irregulars" continue to sabotage oil fields
<Iraqis lay mines at torched oil wells
By GEOFFREY YORK
Wednesday, March 26, 2003 - Page A6
AT THE RUMAILA OIL FIELD, IRAQ -- Like giant oil slicks in the sky, the plumes of thick smoke stretch for vast distances above the Rumaila oil field, blotting the horizon in every direction.
Below each plume is the orange flame of a blazing oil well, sabotaged by retreating Iraqi soldiers.
The U.S.-led military coalition has claimed that only seven oil wells are burning.
But this ignores the fires at smaller pipelines and gas-oil separation plants in recent days.
When I drove through the Rumaila oil field on Sunday, I counted at least 15 blazes in one section.
The hissing and popping of the fires can be heard clearly from the highway.
"It's an environmental disaster," said Ali Asad, one of a 25-member Kuwaiti firefighting team that has been struggling to extinguish the fires for the past two days. "Our target is to end this disaster. The smoke has even reached as far as Kuwait City. It will cause a lot of children to become asthmatic."
United Nations Environment Program official Pekka Haavisto said the problem will also add to the many health problems faced by ordinary Iraqis.
"This burning of the oil wells in the south or . . . around Baghdad is concerning for the health of people inhaling very unclean air on a daily basis," he told Reuters in Sarajevo.
A British soldier, camped with his unit in the middle of the oil field, told me that the retreating Iraqi soldiers had triggered the blazes by blowing off the ends of pipes in gas-oil separation plants. They used remote-controlled or timer-controlled mines in an effort to kill coalition soldiers when they reached the oil wells, he said.
Some of the smaller fires seem to be only a few metres high, but some are reportedly up to 100 metres high. They are burning a mixture of oil and gas, the British soldier said.
He described a deadly mix of booby traps and unexploded ordnance surrounding the blazing wells, making them difficult to extinguish. At one burning well, he said, the Iraqis had abandoned a brand-new, Russian-made T-72 tank. But the tank was surrounded with mines in a booby trap aimed at causing maximum damage to U.S. and British forces.
Efforts to extinguish the fires have been hampered by the continuing resistance of small bands of Iraqi fighters. A U.S. firm, Boots and Coots, was supposed to enter Iraq on Sunday to fight the fires, but it was forced to cancel its plans because the oil field -- previously considered to be secure -- was the scene of a firefight between British forces and Iraqi fighters on the weekend. Now the Houston-based company is expected to begin its work later this week.
It will take weeks to extinguish the Rumaila fires. Mr. Asad's firefighting team extinguished a blaze on Monday at an oil well near the Iraq-Kuwaiti border. But three more fires are raging in the same area, and others can be seen in the distance, he said.
Kuwaiti firefighters said they found evidence that the Iraqis had tried to sabotage other oil wells, too, but failed to blow them up. At several wells they found sandbags and black wires snaking away from the wells, which appeared to be rigged to detonate.
One of the biggest problems is to find enough water to extinguish the fires. In 1991, when retreating Iraqi soldiers ignited blazes at 700 oil wells in Kuwait, firefighters were able to pump water from the Persian Gulf. But this time the fires are deeper in the desert, as far as 30 kilometres from the Kuwaiti border.
The Rumaila oil field is considered crucial to the future of the Iraqi economy. U.S. and British forces have made a major effort to secure Iraq's 1,685 oil wells in the early stages of the war.>
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