Kuwait’s Oil Towns Poisoned by Blazing Wells

It is an oil town like many other oil towns that grew up along the bountiful Persian Gulf, neat row on row of box-like houses, carefully planted lawns and shrubs, a mid-town shopping center with a grocery store, a bank and a cinema.

Just on the fringes of town spring the first of hundreds of wells that for decades have pulled petroleum from the bowels of the Earth and brought prosperity to this small Kuwait suburb that lies at the heart of the world’s second-largest oil field.

Now, the oil that has been Kuwait’s benefactor and sustenance, the foundation of one of the richest economies in the world, has become the poison that is killing it. Ahmadi, a comfortable slice of suburbia in the middle of the Arabian desert, has been transformed into a chilling scene of nuclear winter.

The plodding oil wells that surround the city have under the torches of Iraqi troops become frightening infernos, hurtling flame hundreds of feet into the air and belching clouds of toxic black smoke that crawl low over the city and fan out to an expanse that now reaches 31,000 square miles.

Here, where the sun on many days glows faint and moon-like through a choking blanket of smoke, midnight and midday are often indistinguishable. There is a shroud of oily black on the houses, on the trees, on the sand and on the cars. The Red Crescent flag atop the hospital is a dull gray. Black rain collects in pools in the streets and looks as though it could be set afire. Even the birds, it is said, have changed their color.

Here and in much of Kuwait, fierce winds and unseasonal clouds have lowered temperatures an average of 10 degrees Centigrade below normal levels in what some scientists believe may be a result of convection effects from the ponderous smoke clouds.

“God knows how long this smoke will go on,” sighed Nijmeh Afram, one of the 4,500 of Ahmadi’s 30,000 residents who have not fled. “It will be killing.”

Kuwaiti environmental officials say there is still no way of knowing the extent of the environmental damage from the nearly 530 oil fires raging out of control throughout Kuwait, the poisonous gases possibly released from damaged industrial plants and the millions of barrels of petroleum unleashed into the Persian Gulf--except that it is catastrophic and possibly permanent.

“We see now that every single compartment of our environment is contaminated: air, water, marine life, all the sub-compartments: seawater, sediments, suspended matter, animals. Everything is contaminated around us,” said Dr. Sami Yaakoub, an environmental researcher at the Kuwait Institute of Scientific Research, which was dismantled and demolished by the Iraqis before they fled Kuwait.

“There is now not anything we can do about it,” he added. “We cannot do anything about the sources because the oil is already out. We cannot do anything to protect the targets, the humans, because they already have been exposed. It is a very difficult situation. All we can do is do some studies to look at the dynamics of these pollutants, but the Iraqis took everything. They did not leave us with any of our instruments, our background data, our background samples. So we actually have to start from zero.”

A team of experts from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Sunday completed an initial series of samples around Kuwait city and in southern Kuwait and left without reaching any certain conclusions.

“We don’t know. If I knew, I could say, ‘Get out, you’re all going to die,’ or I could say, ‘It’s OK, you can stay.’ But we just don’t know,” said Jim Makris, chairman of the EPA’s National Response Team.

“The frustration for everyone involved is we’re taught to get to the source of pollution and stop it. We can’t stop it here,” he said. “And this is not going to get stopped any time soon.”

Already, several cases of bronchial asthma and assorted eye, nose and throat irritation have been reported in Ahmadi and the surrounding communities of Fahaheel and Sabahiya, all less than 45 minutes south of Kuwait city. Environmental officials say prolonged exposure to the particulates and unburned oil in the smoke, which contains toxic sulfur, nickel and vanadium, could cause lung cancer.

Environmental experts are recommending that the entire population wear surgical masks on days when the wind draws smoke near populated areas.

Potentially more deadly are wells in western Kuwait known to contain hydrogen sulfide, which if left gushing from unignited, damaged wells could spread an extremely deadly gas over the landscape that kills almost instantly. EPA officials said there were no indications of hydrogen sulfide in the wells they surveyed in southern Kuwait.

“Toxic gas that can wipe out populations doesn’t appear so far. That’s preliminary, not conclusive,” said Makris. But he warned, “The worst thing you can have is false optimism.”

Also of concern is heavy damage to industrial facilities in the Shuaiba industrial area. Yaakoub said residents there began leaving the area in droves, complaining of noxious odors, but it was unclear how the facilities were damaged or what kind of gases had been released into the air.

Emission from the oil fires of sulfur, in oxides or sulfates, is also likely to create acid rain, environmental experts believe, but they say climatic effects are likely to remain localized, over Kuwait. The smoke reaches only about 12,000 feet into the air, not high enough to affect the troposphere, EPA officials said.

In the water, damage from two mammoth oil spills is only beginning to be assessed. Environmental authorities say they have no idea how many miles of beaches may have been spoiled or the extent of damage to marine life in the Persian Gulf.

It is certain that heavy quantities of oil have spread up to one of Kuwait’s three major water desalination plants at Doha near Kuwait city, which is not currently operating. It is also possible that oil in the water has synthesized and broken down to the point that toxic components could be in the water that cannot be screened out from desalination intakes by normal protective devices, Yaakoub said.

Long-chain hydrocarbons and polyaromatic hydrocarbons present in the oil can react with chlorine in water intake plants to form carcinogens, he added.

“The problem is so severe in the marine environment because we have a semi-enclosed body of water with limited currents, high salinity, high temperature and intense sunlight that can photodegrade oil compounds into more toxic compounds,” he said.

“In the long run, we can see that the spill in the marine environment has done irreversible damage. Can anything be done to stop it? At this point, no. Not really.”

Environmental officials are also concerned about damage to the food chain from toxic sediments settling to the bottom of the Gulf and being ingested by sediment-eating organisms that are eventually eaten by fish. Even before the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, potentially dangerous levels of petroleum hydrocarbons had been detected in two edible species of fish.

International environmental experts estimate that 10,000 to 20,000 shore birds have died, and the fouled water and beaches and clouds of smoke are likely to affect the upcoming migration of an estimated 1 million ducks, curlews, sand plovers and other birds that stop off in the Gulf’s tidal flats on their flight north from southern wintering spots.

Other effects are localized, not immediately apparent to the scientists, but achingly obvious to those who must live with them: The leaves that have suddenly cascaded off many of the trees in Ahmadi, and the thick black tar that covers the parsley grown for the Arabs’ favorite tabouleh salad.

There is the dull roar of the flames that, on the outskirts of town, underlies every other sound, day and night. In a country without electricity, there is night that follows night, without end.

“Twenty-four hours a day, this smoke is coming to our house, day by day. All our eyes are affected, our breathing is affected, we cannot even sleep properly. We are exhausted,” said Lucine Taslakian, a nurse at Ahmadi Hospital.

“Before, we were scared of the war. Now, we are scared of the smoke,” said Afram.

While thousands of Kuwaitis have fled the emirate’s southern oil fields, others say they cannot leave. One resident remarked Saturday: “Even the birds have changed. Everything is dirty. The ground is dirty, the walls are dirty. It is all black. Everything is black, black.”

A woman who identified herself only as Rebhiya went to the hospital on Saturday. The smoke had rekindled her asthma. She felt like she was suffocating. “So you pushed Saddam out,” she said. “Please push the smoke out.”

Times staff writer Bob Drogin contributed to this report.