
When the Oil Fields Burned - JamilD
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/08/sunday-review/exposures-kuwait-salgado.html
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wayzel
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.

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ghaff
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.

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jheriko
"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.

~~~
jwiley
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.

~~~
ghaff
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.

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presidentender
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](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.

~~~
SuperChihuahua
Fire of Kuwait on youtube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L77BSBKvMJk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L77BSBKvMJk)

~~~
presidentender
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L77BSBKvMJk#t=27m22s)

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gsch
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/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3674140/)

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TheSpiceIsLife
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessons_of_Darkness)

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ghaff
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.

