Fighting Oil Fires in Iraq Rekindles Desert Rivalry
By CHIP CUMMINS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
SOUTH RUMEILA OIL FIELD, Iraq -- As oil-well fires were raging here last weekend, Brian Krause, president of Boots & Coots International Well Control Inc., was on hand to boast that his team of Texas firefighters would need just a few weeks to douse the blazes.
But as the 47-year-old Mr. Krause talked -- decked out in his company's trademark red coveralls -- a team of Kuwaiti firefighters was already moving its equipment into Iraq's second-largest oil field, now under U.S. and British control. Braving minefields and ignoring reports of Iraqi guerrillas in the area, the Kuwaitis snuffed out the first fire on Monday, days before Mr. Krause was ready to roll.
"We had all our equipment ready, and Boots & Coots didn't," says Aisa A. Bou Yabes, the chief firefighter for the state-owned Kuwait Oil Co. Mr. Bou Yabes, a 46-year-old with a long, graying beard, nonchalantly mentions that his men cleared away some cluster bombs by themselves.
As war in Iraq broke out, the oil industry braced for horrific fires in the country's massive oil fields. Experts expected an encore to the 1991 inferno set by retreating Iraqi soldiers, who torched some 700 Kuwaiti wells during the Persian Gulf War. So far, the damage in southern Iraq has been limited: The Iraqis have lit only a handful of fires, though the situation could change with Baghdad still in control of Iraq's northern wells. For now, an old rivalry has flared over who will extinguish as many as eight well fires that are burning.
Twelve years ago, an army of Texans descended on the emirate of Kuwait to help put out its oil-well fires. The firemen, a colorful community concentrated in Houston, did the job in less than nine months, much quicker than oil-industry executives expected, but they ruffled lots of feathers. Paul "Red" Adair, the flamboyant elder statesman of the trade, blasted Kuwait for bureaucracy that slowed the arrival of equipment to the burning fields. The Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. shot back that Mr. Adair's complaint was "Mickey Mouse."
Oil-well firefighting is a storied trade, once dominated by showmen such as Mr. Adair, who decorated his Houston headquarters in plush red carpet and kept a fleet of red company Cadillacs. Mr. Krause worked in Kuwait for Mr. Adair, who is now retired. In the U.S. these professional firefighters are typically hardened oil-field hands, who learn to use everything from water to high-powered explosives to extinguish raging fires.
Mr. Krause, whose 11-member team hasn't been able to start fighting fires yet in Iraq because it's been waiting for equipment, has been impressed with the Kuwaitis' early efforts. "They said, 'Shoot, we'll go ahead and start working,' " he marvels. The Kuwaitis are good firefighters, he says, but adds: "On real, real, real critical wells, they'll call us in."
So far, the Kuwaitis haven't needed much help. With blasts from two water cannons, Mr. Bou Yabes and his 30-member team snuffed their first fire early this week in 15 minutes. The next day, the team capped the gushing oil well.
Fierce sandstorms appeared temporarily to have damped three other raging fires in recent days, though the wells still need to be properly extinguished and capped. Meanwhile, American oil-field contractors spent much of the week trying to line up trucks, bulldozers and other heavy equipment, and secure a reliable water supply. Holed up in the Crown Plaza hotel in Kuwait City, they were also waiting for U.S. troops to secure the fields after hearing unconfirmed reports of a firefight between coalition soldiers and Iraqi troops.
"I don't see any hostile forces," shrugged Mr. Bou Yabes, speaking from a cellphone a few hundred yards from the reported site of a battle the evening before.
Soldiers barred nonmilitary personnel from the field for part of the week, saying the area was still heavily mined and dangerous. But Mr. Bou Yabes didn't wait. After finding several live antipersonnel cluster bombs in the desert, he ordered a bulldozer in and had the driver plow them away. "One of them exploded," he says with a shrug. The driver wasn't hurt.
Mr. Bou Yabes put his firefighters on standby last week before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq -- just in case Saddam Hussein retaliated with missile attacks against Kuwait's fields. That didn't happen, but when Kuwait Oil officials heard about the fires in Iraq, they quickly sent Mr. Bou Yabes over the border.
When the Kuwaitis showed up at South Rumeila, it wasn't clear if they had U.S. or British army permission to be in Iraq in the first place. "We saw them coming up on the breach," the gap in the wall of sand at the Iraq-Kuwait border, "but we didn't have any prior notice," said Lt. James Mitchell of the First Battalion Royal Irish Regiment, who is guarding the fields here. The Kuwaitis were allowed to put out the first fire. But sensing unease from the military and American contractors, the Kuwaitis held off tackling another well until they sorted things out over lunch with the Americans.
"We decided to, as they say in Texas, hold our horses," Mr. Bou Yabes says.
The Kuwaitis are now coordinating their work under an agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Unlike the Texan contractors, the Kuwaiti company isn't getting paid by the U.S. for its firefighting services. They say their help is a gesture of friendship to the Iraqi people, but Kuwait also wanted to prevent pollution risks and damage to the underground oil reservoirs, which it shares with Iraq.
"They just showed up. It was a real surprise to me," says Ray Rodon, the project manager here for a Houston-based unit of Halliburton Co., which has been hired by the U.S. to supervise firefighting efforts. Boots & Coots is a subcontractor.
The Kuwaitis were on the job Thursday, at a burning well in South Rumeila that Mr. Bou Yabes dubbed "A2," just a few hundred yards from another fire that Mr. Krause's team expects to handle as early as Friday. Mr. Bou Yabes's men, pushing up toward the fire behind corrugated tin shields, attacked an orange ball of flame with water cannons. The roar of the fire intensified as the flames turned into a dusty ball of brown. A few seconds later, the flames burst skyward again.
Wearing a shiny metal hard-hat, ornately inlaid with galloping horsemen, Mr. Bou Yabes conceded a temporary setback: A water pump wasn't working right. He ran off and grabbed a sledgehammer from a colleague and gave the pump a few whacks, to no avail.
Mr. Bou Yabes battled fires in Kuwait alongside the founders of Boots & Coots, Asger "Boots" Hansen and Edward "Coots" Matthews, both now retired. In 1991, Mr. Bou Yabes remembers Texans betting that his team couldn't put out one particularly nasty tower of flame and smoke in Kuwait's burning fields. They did.
Friday, the Texans plan to begin battling the fires alongside the Kuwaitis. Both sides downplay any rivalry. Still, "there's some of that manliness, like we don't want the other guy to finish before us," Mr. Krause says, referring to Mr. Bou Yabes. "He'd be lying if he didn't tell you that, too."
Write to Chip Cummins at chip.cummins@wsj.com |
