As the Iraqi army fled Kuwait in 1991, it torched Kuwait’s rich oilfields, sabotaging more than 700 oil wells. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s scorched earth policy spilled millions of barrels of oil into the Kuwait desert, one of the world’s worst environmental disasters. As the Iraqis were routed by US led coalition forces, fires from the blown up wells blackened the sky.  It would take six months to extinguish them all.  Four firms, specialists in fighting oil well fires were brought in for the heavy lifting: three American outfits from Texas, and one Canadian, Alberta’s Safety Boss.

These photographs of the Safety Boss crew appeared in the October 1991 issue of Saturday Night Magazine.  Kissing The Fire, the story title, was one firefighter’s description of killing these runaway blowtorches in Kuwait’s Burgan oilfield. Here’s an excerpt from the essay:

Bomb squads have already swept Burgan 57, and for several days mechanical shovels and hoes have raked and clawed away 1800-degree coke, oil sediment that has hardened into twenty-foot piles that obscure the flame. The trick to killing Burgan 57 will be to smother the flame so that the well can be “stung”: the crew will lower a probe by crane into the centre of the plume, then pump heavy drilling mud into the well to contain the crude gushing at hundreds of miles an hour through a three-inch pipe. Once sealed, the well can be capped with a new valve, and a safety Boss decal slapped on.

The best way to fight a Kuwaiti blowtorch is at close quarters. Miller’s men call it kissing the fire: creeping right up to the flame under a protective umbrella of water spray, and blasting it with hoses from fifteen feet away.

Two days after the fire is finally out, crew chief Ken Rose tries again to sting Burgan 57. This is the most dangerous work. The spray makes it difficult to see or to hold slippery hand tools, and the gusher’s roar makes it impossible to hear. The well is still spouting with enough velocity to create a vacuum one foot wide around its plume. As Rose steps in, 57 rips his hardhat his hard hat off his head and tears a three-inch-square patch of skin off his arm. Within seconds he’s covered in oil, ‘gooped’, they call it. “The oil’s bad enough,” he says, “but when the shamals (desert winds) kick up sand, it’s like wearing liquid sandpaper.” Rose retreats from the well every few minutes to receive a gulp of water and a blast from the fire hose. A “gooped” man can’t perspire because his pores are sealed. In the desert heat, he’ll start to bake within minutes.