The Spoils of War : A Report on the Eco-Disaster in the Persian Gulf

ON AN OVERCAST MORNING, THE AIR IN KUWAIT CITY FEELS heavy with rain. Late spring is normally hotter. But today the wind has shifted, and the smoke thrown up by hundreds of thundering oil-well fires has stretched across Kuwait’s populated coastal areas. Under the cloud, the air smells like wet burned rubber. Water is a byproduct of fire, and the enormous plume traps the vapor. In Kuwait and parts of Saudi Arabia, exposed metal rusts quickly and the grass has grown higher this season. Scientists speculate that the cloud’s acid rain could be balancing and, oddly, improving the region’s highly alkaline soil.

Across hundreds of square miles of desert in Kuwait and northern Saudi Arabia, the sand is unnaturally dark; sheep have black coats; alley cats are dingy gray; grasses, trees and the prickly bush called alfarj have turned deep black-green from coatings of oil. The few drivers heading south out of Kuwait City turn their headlights on, one by one, as daylight disappears. By midday it is a moonless night, an unnervingly total, prolonged eclipse.

Months after Saddam Hussein’s forces unloosed an immense oil spill and set fire to Kuwait’s vast oil fields, Kuwait City is bedraggled and awash in environmental rumor. Recently, word spread that nuclear waste had been found at the airport (false), that oil was still leaking from damaged pipelines and wrecked tankers (true), that autopsied sheep lungs resembled those of a 40-year smoker (unconfirmed), that typhoid had turned up in Safwan (unconfirmed). Meanwhile, communications and emergency efforts have been hobbled by such homely needs as paper, functioning telephones and photocopiers. And although some long-term effects will not be known for years, credible damage assessments are now starting to come in. In general, they are more sanguine than the apocalyptic warnings of a few months ago. And emergency workers have had their hard-won triumphs.

Of the estimated 600 to 700 wells, storage tanks and refineries first ignited by Iraqi troops, nearly 200 have been capped. Firefighters, by official estimate, have been shutting down two or more blazing wells a day. The Kuwait government hopes to speed this up by bringing in more teams. In the meantime, the long, black trail of smoke twists on the wind--one day reaching as far south as 250 miles into Saudi Arabia, the next day stretching northeast over Iran, Pakistan, the Soviet Union, the next drifting north over the rubble of Iraq. It is dumping tremendous but uncalculated amounts of sulfuric acid rain, mostly in Iran. Worse, it could leave behind a tide of cancer, particularly in Kuwait. Yet some optimism has begun to return as the countdown continues of blazing wells snuffed and capped, as the oil cloud gradually lightens.

In Saudi Arabia, the legacy of the oil spill is unclear--no one is even sure how much oil was spilled--but in the short term much of the floating oil has been retrieved. “This is probably the most effective oil-skimming operation in history,” says Brian Biddle, a veteran Australian spill manager. “It could have been much worse.” The oil hit shore almost entirely on uninhabited beaches. The toll on plant and animal life has been substantial, particularly for birds. But contrary to predictions, only a few turtles and no dolphins and dugongs--the shy, plump relatives of the sea cow--are known to have died from the effects of the spill. Green and hawksbill turtles have already returned to their breeding islands, and the vital seagrass beds apparently remain intact. In many ways, the Gulf has begun to heal.

If either disaster had occurred in Los Angeles or Houston, it would have caused national outrage. But for many in the Gulf, environmental damage doesn’t yet compete with the terrors of occupation and war. “A knock on your door, you might die,” remembers Ali Haider, marine-pollution controller for Kuwait’s Shuaiba Port. “That’s why I say, dark? So what? No water? So what?” Even so, the two unprecedented ecological calamities have awakened environmental values in the Saudis and Kuwaitis, who traditionally have accepted centuries of overgrazing, oil slicks that have turned some beaches into asphalt roads and wildlife decimation from hunting with automatic shotguns and four-wheel drives. The two Gulf nations now have had, in a way, their Three Mile Islands.

There are lessons here for the rest of the world, too. The devastation has revived an international debate that challenges the conventional wisdom of many U.S. environmentalists. In the end, some old notions may be rethought, changing not only how repair of the Gulf proceeds but how future disasters will be dealt with.

A Ghost Town Remains

AHMADI, A TOWN WITH well fires only a few hundred feet from homes, was once the greenest city in Kuwait, a handsome company town of 25,000 people, with lawns, yellow bungalows and the well-tended headquarters of the Kuwait Oil Co. It is now a near-ghost town of perhaps 5,000. Residents first fled during the Iraqi occupation, then declined to return after Ahmadi became the closest urban area in Kuwait to the burning wells. Trees, cars, houses, the ground itself are not only crusted but sticky with oil. The few outdoor workers wear hardware-store paper masks that are designed to protect lungs from sawdust and paint flecks but are useless against fine smoke particles. The public building closest to the fires is the hospital.

So far, the most common health problem has been a serious increase in asthma attacks, and more elderly patients seem to be coming down with pneumonia. Ahmadi Hospital’s lack of a working computer makes these numbers difficult to assemble. But when the wind drives the smoke cloud straight into town, says Dr. Hassan Zaid, who is in charge of casualty and trauma, patients he would ordinarily see once or twice a month come in three or four times a day. Many asthmatics have moved to Kuwait City, 25 miles away, or have left the country.

There is also a psychological toll. “This smoke makes some people break down,” Zaid says. “People are sitting inside their homes, and they keep their children inside the house, and sometimes this affects them emotionally. Sometimes you hit the child, or this makes problems with your wife.” The day before, Zaid had watched a young man die from a self-inflicted wound from an M-16 combat rifle lying around his house. “There are a lot of guns now in Kuwait,” Zaid says.

Long-term problems could be much broader. What worries most health scientists is that no one yet knows exactly what’s in the smoke, and what damage it can do. Early tests of the plume focused on the search for pollutants that could kill or harm immediately. Now the concern is potential long-term harm.

In March, a team of U.S. researchers, including experts from the Environmental Protection Agency, announced that a quick reconnaissance showed no substantial amounts of sulfur dioxide or, worse, hydrogen sulfide, the gas with the rotten-egg smell that, in a concentrated blast, can kill humans outright. The EPA also found high concentrations of soot particles in the air but discovered no alarming levels of toxic chemicals attached to that soot.

Some U.S. environmentalists are far more alarmed. “I’m outraged at the report EPA brought back,” says Brent Blackwelder, vice president for policy for Friends of the Earth. “It read as if they’d visited a neighborhood bonfire to toast some marshmallows.”

“With unfavorable wind conditions,” Blackwelder had earlier warned a U.S. Senate committee, “the smoke people are breathing is not unlike putting your head over a barbecue pit or like standing behind the exhaust pipes of hundreds of malfunctioning diesel trucks.”

In Kuwait City, Dr. Mostafa Desouky, a slight, soft-spoken researcher and head of air-quality monitoring for Kuwait’s Environmental Protection Department, does what he can in a beleaguered agency. The Iraqis drove off with his small fleet of mobile monitoring stations, and the department has worked for weeks without functioning photocopiers. When the EPA came through, Desouky’s tiny staff, ardently trying to cooperate, turned over their last file copies of some of their data. Of the department’s 300 employees before the war, perhaps 50 have gone back to work. When his secretary walked in one morning, she was surprised to see him, since so many in the government had left or been killed. “She thought I was dead,” he says with a sigh.

Desouky has been looking for possible health effects from some of the smoke pollutants. “We didn’t find any difference before and after the well fires for the prevalence of chest complaints,” he says, though that evaluation is based on records at only one hospital.

Desouky’s small crew also has tested for such common pollutants as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and ozone. Levels of these contaminants have in some cases risen over the year before, but not enough to cause concern.

In fact, these readings “don’t come anywhere close to the levels of air pollution that we get in the L.A. Basin; they’re way, way below,” says Dr. J. Brian Mudd, director of the Air Pollution Center at UC Riverside, who has looked at some of Desouky’s data. But the numbers for another set of pollutants, the total amount of hydrocarbons in the air, bother Desouky and Mudd.

“That’s where you get a big excess,” Mudd says. “The range there is 3 to 19 parts per million (p.p.m.). In the L.A. Basin, we get readings like 3 p.p.m., that’s the max. . . . And the most important data is missing--that’s PM-10.”

PM-10 is scientific shorthand for particles--anything from sand to coal smoke to, in this case, oil-fire soot--that are 10 microns or smaller in size, small enough to be breathed into the lung. Particulates of this size can trigger asthma attacks and cause serious, immediate harm to people with other respiratory problems. Even in a normal year, Kuwait will experience, from blowing sand, some of the highest levels of PM-10 in the world, up to four times the highest levels in the L.A. air basin. PM-10 is already thought to be causing long-term lung scarring in many Kuwaitis.

But PM-10 can also carry into the lung other chemical pollutants--including ones known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, some of which can cause cancer. Worst are the smallest of particles, under 2.5 microns. And these almost always come from combustion, not natural dust.

“The fine particles out there are the ones rich in all those nasty heavy metals and organics,” explains Robert Frank, professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Scientists suspect that Kuwait’s wells are producing fine particles in strength. In fact, the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization has released the startling estimate that in a year of burning, Kuwait’s wells could double the fine particles now in the world’s atmosphere.

The Iraqis stole Kuwait’s PM-10 air monitors. To give Kuwaitis his assessment of PM-10’s health hazards, Desouky has to rely on foreign researchers.

Some U.S. environmentalists believe that governments have had more than enough time to sort out the situation. Friends of the Earth, for instance, has sent an expedition of its own to solve the mystery of the oil cloud’s composition. The National Toxics Campaign says that in ad-hoc testing conducted by several journalists and soldiers in Kuwait, the smoke contained high levels of toxic heavy metals; it plans to look for more.

Meanwhile, a second, larger wave of government scientists from more than a dozen countries has returned to the scene. A team from Harvard’s School of Public Health, under contract to the World Health Organization, is studying particles of 2.5 microns or smaller taken from various Kuwaiti neighborhoods, including a house in Ahmadi. To no one’s surprise, the EPA’s first tests showed that particulates were highest at oil-blackened Ahmadi Hospital.

The well fires won’t last forever, of course. But curbing the oil plume is still many months away, by the best estimates. “By that time, the PM-10 is deposited in the lungs,” Mudd says, “and if it has carcinogens, they’re going to work over a period of 20 or 25 years.”

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration plans to set up an early warning system for Kuwaitis. What concerns many scientists is the greater likelihood of dead-calm summer days, which could cause the oil cloud to settle over urban neighborhoods, particularly in Ahmadi.

“We would like to be able to see that coming,” says John H. Robinson, manager of the Persian Gulf project for NOAA. “These things are likely to be two- or three-day events. They’re not going to be something that goes on for a long period of time. I think there are measures probably short of evacuation that can do the trick.” Robinson maintains that it will probably be enough for people to stay in their houses if the cloud settles over their heads. Others aren’t as optimistic.

“That cuts it down a bit,” Mudd says. “But the PM-10 is such a small particle that it does in fact get into dwellings.”

Meanwhile, to no fanfare, firefighters capped off the most obnoxious Ahmadi well--the one that was pumping its plume directly at the next-door hospital--in the second week of May.

The Bigger Picture

HELICOPTERS--LIKE restaurants, international telephone lines and traffic cops--are still hard to come by in postwar Kuwait, which is one reason that it was late April before Badria A. Awadhi made her first aerial inspection of the fires and oil spill.

Awadhi, a rare woman in power in this corner of the Middle East, heads the U.N.-organized Regional Organization for the Protection of the Marine Environment, the most influential conservation planning agency in the Gulf. ROPME, based in Kuwait, is host to a troupe of researchers coming in under the U.N. flag. The World Meteorological Organization, the World Health Organization and others will study regional and global effects.

ROPME has been both invigorated and overrun by the war. Awadhi took over the 5-year-old organization in 1984 despite reluctance in Iran and Saudi Arabia to accept a woman. As dean of law at Kuwait University and a specialist in international pollution law, she was the most qualified candidate, she says with a shrug. By all accounts, she’s proved her case in creating a promising regional organization.

“That system, before the war, would have been a model,” says Bill Eichbaum, a vice president of the World Wildlife Fund.

Awadhi was at a conference in Japan when the Iraqis invaded. She had someone else deliver her address and took a plane to Bahrain, where she spent the occupation keeping her tattered organization alive. Only five people were left of a staff of 32, and one member nation, Iraq, had become an ecological terrorist against the others. Awadhi was still able to call an emergency meeting of the other Gulf countries, bring in a Norwegian oil-recovery vessel to work on the spill and prepare to carry on after the war. This seems assured. “The big wheels around the Gulf have decided to keep moving on ROPME, especially after this crisis,” says Yusef Haider of the ROPME-created marine mutual aid center in Bahrain.

But Awadhi is also Kuwaiti, and she has been anxious to survey her country’s ecological wounds. Now, head clamped between earphones, she is strapped into a Kuwait Air Force Puma helicopter, over central Kuwait.

Filling the nearby open doorway is a sight new to the planet--Burgan field, one of the world’s largest oil fields, with row after row of wellheads ablaze. Around many of the fires, pools and lakes of oil have spread out. In between are the more familiar traces of war--miles of tank tracks, wrecked vehicles, berms, bunkers, bomb craters. Kuwait has for decades fought a losing battle to keep what little vegetation it has. Vehicle tracks have done much of the damage.

Now the fragile desert soil has been ground up from one horizon to the other. Everywhere a tank was positioned, Iraqi bulldozers scraped together three-sided barriers of sand. Allied and Iraqi vehicles plowed across the land in lines thousands of yards abreast. At least three Iraqi minefields still cut across the country. Hundreds of square miles are littered with unexploded bombs and ammunition.

This debris continues to take its toll. Children and souvenir hunters have been killed, or come back from the desert with their hands blown off--an estimated three or four a day just after the war. No one has tallied the human casualties. Hundreds of camels have died in the minefields alone.

Awadhi is grim, hunched against the wind as the helicopter turns toward the beach. Soon the shallow green coastal waters of the Gulf appear below. Fingers of oil drift everywhere. Progressing south, Awadhi knows, the oil turns into a steady black stain underwater and on the shore, where it has dripped like lethal paint along 250 miles of the Saudi Arabian coastline. Awadhi has been given a dramatic, if disastrous example with which to persuade the sometimes reluctant Gulf nations to agree to her plans for applying strict controls over oil traffic in the region.

When the helicopter sets down in an undamaged corner of the airport, Awadhi is subdued, more shocked by the oil fires than the marine pollution. “You cannot imagine it is like that,” she says. “They show a little burning oil on TV.” Back in her office, which is nearly devoid of staff, she becomes the determined internationalist and organizer again. “The international community should see this as something very, very disastrous,” she pronounces.

The international community does. Kuwait has become one of the world’s major man-made pollution sources, says Rumen Bojkof, chief of the environmental program of the World Meteorological Organization.

WMO recently invited 50 atmospheric specialists from 14 countries to Geneva to assess the research so far on the oil fires. Some environmentalists have been alarmed that NOAA had found traces of soot--likely from the fires--thousands of miles away at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Blackened snow has been reported in the Himalayas. Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan and UCLA atmospheric specialist Richard Turco had warned that enough of the oil cloud could get high enough in the atmosphere to cool the Earth’s climate--if not to a full-blown “nuclear winter,” to what has come to be called a “petroleum autumn.” But scientists at the WMO conference agreed with a British aerial survey team that the smoke is disturbing the regional atmosphere, but not, Bojkof says, “on a hemispheric scale, not on a global scale.”

Sulfuric acid rain, however, is another matter. Particularly in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the southern Soviet Union, which are usually downwind of Kuwait, acid rain is “very severe,” Bojkof says. According to a WMO estimate, the fires dump more than 40,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, which forms the acid rain, into the atmosphere daily, equal to the combined emissions of France, Germany and Great Britain.

The victims may not even know what’s hitting them. A few hundred kilometers from the fires, the oil cloud seems to disappear as the larger soot particles drop away.

Yet pollutant levels are actually higher downwind than in Kuwait itself. Bojkof compares this effect to standing next to a factory chimney.

“The people downwind in Iran, for example, they don’t see anything, they don’t feel anything,” Bojkof says. “But when the rain is falling, their crop is damaged.”

The World’s Largest Spill

THE WAR IS LONG OVER, television news crews have prowled the oil-spill scene, switched their lights off and moved on. Still the scientists and contractors are putting in 12-hour days, seven days a week, doing the unglamorous dirty work of coordination, cost estimates, the triage of limited resources.

So a fragment of possibly good news brings a faint cheer in the Dammam headquarters of the oil-spill fight. A cleanup crew on uninhabited Musallamiyah Bay, 125 miles north, has discovered that the oil there can be rolled right off the shore, like a carpet.

A few days later, the international team of scientists and contractors plow through the sand for a look. At a small, unnamed cove in the bay they find a line of dump trucks and a front-end loader standing idle, too heavy to work in the soft soil.

No one is rolling oil off the ground like a rug.

Instead, half a dozen Pakistanis in orange jumpsuits fill plastic sacks with flat chunks of oil-soaked earth. One shovels; two hold the bag. A small rectangle of ground has been laid bare to the tan soil. But elsewhere the marsh remains a black, stinking bog of drying petroleum. Dead plants, crabs and fish are glued to the ground with oil. The Pakistanis pose solemnly with their tools. The scientists walk off in polite dismay.

The oil comes up easily because it is attached to inch-thick, pale-green mats of algae. Unfortunately, the algae is part of the habitat the scientists hope to save.

Though U.S. environmentalists have fought hard to require polluters to clean up aggressively after every spill, European experts have long been more cautious. Both groups agree that what’s most important is to keep oil from the beaches in the first place. But if that battle is lost, there is disagreement about what should happen next. European environmentalists, especially, contend that oil is often better left in place in such fragile habitats, no matter the visual blight. As they learned from the 1978 Amoco Cadiz spill, off the coast of France, trampling around to remove oil often meant that it could take a decade--not three to four years--for plant life to reappear. After all, oil, a natural substance, does break down over time.

“The big plants, and even the algae itself, might survive the oil,” says Atilio Francois, a French salt-marsh expert, shaking his head at the bare ground, “but not this scraping.”

The work crew’s well-meaning effort is what many environmentalists now reject as the “bulldozer” method of spill cleanup. In oil spills, less may be more, as the elaborate but often unsuccessful cleaning of Prince William Sound has confirmed. That is not yet a popular opinion in the United States, however. Here, the political, if not necessarily scientific, push has been to make polluters restore the environment to its pristine former self, no matter the cost. Until recently, there has not been much public discussion of whether such restoration is realistically possible.

Meanwhile, almost five months after oil began to flow south from Kuwait, most work on the Persian Gulf spill is quietly drawing to a close--amid good intentions, bureaucratic tangles, confusing statistics and yet, by several measures, surprising success.

Environmentalists both in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world are generally dismayed at how little was done to protect wildlife habitat--particularly compared with heroic efforts by Saudi agencies to keep oil from the country’s desalination plants, which produce two-thirds of the nation’s drinking water. Many also believe that at least some shoreline should be cleaned.

“There is essentially no (oil-spill) cleanup effort underway,” complains William M. Arkin of Greenpeace, who is writing a book about the effects of the Gulf War. “Particularly the Coast Guard guys I’ve been talking to basically say, ‘Forget it, it’s too late.’ But I think that obviously there is some cleanup that could be done, and certainly Saudi Arabia has the bucks to do it.”

The Saudis say they don’t. The cost of the war has left the government strapped for funds, they say. Indeed, the oil spill has been fought on a shoestring. Exxon Corp. spent more than $2 billion in Alaska. By most estimates, the Saudi government has spent no more than $150 million on the spill. Only two or three naturalists have been available at any one time to give environmental guidance for the entire spill.

“If Exxon found itself short of scientists, they’d just go out and hire some more,” says Roy E. Nichols, a retired U.S. Coast Guard commander who represented the International Maritime Organization at the spill through most of the spring.

But most environmentalists see progress. It’s the first spill of any consequence the Saudis have ever fought. Many Saudi citizens have discovered environmentalism. Saudi environmental agencies are much better prepared for the future.

And by the most common measure of spill-fighting success among international experts--the oil recovered--the Saudis may have managed an unprecedented feat.

This would be easier to judge, of course, if anyone was sure how big the spill was. But that is the most slippery statistic in the Persian Gulf. When a tanker hits a rock, ship records give the volume of oil lost. This spill came from many undocumented sources. Estimates have gone from an early high of 11 million barrels--three times more than the world’s next-biggest spill--down to 3.5 million barrels and now, officially, back up to 6 million to 8 million barrels. It is again the world’s largest. (The Exxon Valdez wasn’t in the same league, with a mere 260,000 barrels spilled.)

This is of more than academic interest at the new Eastern Region compound, on the outskirts of Dammam, of the Saudi agency in charge of spill work--the Meteorology and Environmental Protection Administration. Every evening over the din of a powerful air conditioner come the daily reports--from MEPA and its U.S. contractors, Bechtel Corp. and Crowley Maritime Corp.; Saudi Aramco; the Saudi wildlife commission; scientists from Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals; the IMO; the Japanese, Dutch, Australian and European delegations; the U.S. Coast Guard.

Every evening, the recovery teams announce the barrels of oil they took off the water that day. Competition has set in among the different cleanup groups. But MEPA is in a larger race, for international approval. And the amount recovered from this spill looks awfully good.

Under average conditions, 10% to 15% of any spill is considered about the most that can be retrieved. That may seem low, but as much as half of an oil spill evaporates before it can be skimmed. MEPA claims 1.4 million barrels of pure oil--no water mixed in--recovered by early June, and an impressive 18% to 24% recovery.

“They’re doing a damned good job of recovery, or a damned good job of lying,” said one spill fighter who tends to believe MEPA’s numbers.

In fact, no one doubts that a lot of oil has been taken off the water. Saudi geography cupped much of it in bays and inlets as it slipped down the coast. The main spill was finally trapped by Abu Ali Island, in what U.S. advisers came to call the Catcher’s Mitt. Oil that didn’t hit the coast was vacuumed from onshore into pits--a far easier procedure than open-water skimming. One storage pit alone holds twice the oil released by the Exxon Valdez. Yet this may not mollify critics, within MEPA and without, who have criticized the agency for not having reacted faster to the drifting slick.

Established by royal decree in 1982, MEPA has had a rough infancy. Within a year it faced Saddam’s first adventure in environmental warfare--the 1.2-million-barrel flow from Iran’s Nowruz oil field, which was shot up by Iraqi missiles and artillery during the Iran-Iraq war. It was the largest spill the Gulf had seen, and MEPA did virtually nothing as oil splashed up on the Saudi shore.

“We didn’t have enough infrastructure to deal with an oil spill,” admits Dr. Nizar I. Tawfiq, vice president of MEPA and head of the agency’s current spill response.

Six years later, MEPA was tested again on a small spill on the Red Sea and managed to do “a good, professional job,” says Tawfiq, a tireless, witty and respected university-professor-turned-bureaucrat.

Now Saddam’s second big spill has sorely tried the agency again. No national groundswell of emotion rose among the Saudis themselves to fight the spill, but it commanded the quick attention of the rest of the world.

There wasn’t even an adequate MEPA office on the Gulf coast. “There was nothing,” says G. J. van Hoogen, manager of the Dutch spill-cleanup company TCA, an early arrival among the contractors. “You got a fax machine, you took the fax out of the box, turned the box over and put the fax on top. You might know where you needed a nail, but you didn’t have a hammer.”

Saudi Arabia called for international help. But it was wartime, and frantic early efforts were hampered by military controls. Strings of plastic boom were put in place only to protect industrial facilities on the shore, not mangroves or salt marshes. After the cease-fire came a period of interagency scuffling. Meanwhile, the major contractors, Bechtel and Crowley Maritime, arrived, worked for a while, then returned to their tents when contracts didn’t meet their expectations. It was a month and a half before Crowley, MEPA’s contractor for its own recovery plans, signed a contract and began pumping oil off the water. No contractors would discuss the negotiations, but they clearly were concerned about getting paid; the Saudis were said even then to be in financial trouble from the cost of the war.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia also has a certain business reputation. In a typical tale, one contractor says his company once agreed to provide a set number of workers for a job. But Saudi immigration authorities turned down visa requests for many of these specialists. When the work was done, the Saudis, complaining that the company’s work force hadn’t been up to required strength, docked the firm 10% of its fee.

In this hubbub, environmental protection was a tough sell. The IMO used its own money--a $4-million emergency fund to protect the Gulf marine environment--to try to save the most environmentally sensitive habitat. The IMO cleared prime sea turtle nesting islands before the turtles came ashore; funded efforts to keep the last two tiny stretches of salt marsh clean, and tried to stop oil leaks still coming down from Kuwait.

From the start, the Saudi wildlife commission pressed MEPA to use boom to keep oil away from still-clean salt marshes and mangrove swamps. Tawfiq said that MEPA lacked equipment. The oil kept moving south.

“Ninety days into the spill, and not a meter of boom was placed to protect the environment,” complains Australian naturalist Tony Preen, a consultant to the commission.

With almost all the floating oil off the water, Tawfiq now has issued a call for more international help and says MEPA will turn to cleaning mangrove thickets, salt marshes and other damaged habitat. Yet he has also admitted that the Saudi government is inclined to be “practical” about cleaning up uninhabited shoreline, and most spill veterans expect MEPA’s effort to quietly cease sometime this summer, or in the fall at the latest.

Good Will

JUST INSIDE THE WHITE, one-story center of the Jubayl Wildlife Rescue Project is a walk-in freezer. “This is the bad part,” says Dave Mac Phee as he opens a heavy stainless-steel door. Stacks of cormorants, their black feathers glazed with frost, stare out. On the floor is a young male green turtle the size of an auto tire. Mac Phee turns with relief to the rooms where the living are washed and rehabilitated.

“Four other turtles were treated and released,” he notes. A cheery American-born auditor from Long Island, N.Y., Mac Phee has worked in the Middle East for the past 14 years--nine of those, like many of the center’s volunteers, for Saudi Aramco, the Saudi Arabian Oil Co. He has shown up every weekend for months, since the Saudi government made available the recreation center for a nearby public-works project. “I guess they decided that the birds were more important than people,” Mac Phee says, “and I have to say I agree with them.” He has found, for example, that cormorants show individual personalities, like cats.

By all accounts, the Jubayl Wildlife Rescue Project has been the most successful program born of the oil spill in raising Saudi interest in environmental concerns. It arrives, however, as animal conservationists around the world are reconsidering whether cleaning oil-soaked wildlife is worth the effort. Some wildlife experts also question whether for individual animals, being “saved” is the most humane option.

“A huge debate rages in conservation circles, in fact, whether it’s appropriate to do this,” says John Grainger, in the Dammam office of the wildlife commission, an hour south of Jubayl. Grainger, an environmental scientist on the staff, is a tanned, thoughtful British-born veteran of 20 years as a conservationist in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Birds, many ornithologists say, can leave a center having been cleaned but with low levels of toxins in their systems and weakened from the stress of captivity. Several birds with leg bands from the Jubayl rescue center already have been found dead. An autopsy of one showed that it had ingested a lethal quantity of oil, probably before it was cleaned.

Still, many Western countries now routinely set up such rescue centers in the emotional days after a big spill, whether a species is directly threatened with extinction or not. It cost $80,000 to rehabilitate each sea otter at the rescue center in Valdez, Alaska. Admittedly much of this expense was due to lack of advance preparation. Yet only 30% of the most heavily oiled otters--and 63% of all otters brought in--survived treatment. Current estimates are that more than 5,000 of the 30,000 otters of Prince William Sound died anyway. In some environmentally sophisticated nations, such salvage operations have been scrapped after cost-benefit analysis.

“In Sweden, they don’t bother; they shoot all the oiled birds,” Grainger says. “It just doesn’t make sense to them.”

His own sense of humane treatment reveals itself when a spill worker walks in to place an oiled sparrow, weakly flapping against a plastic bag, on Grainger’s desk. The bird, says Grainger tiredly, is in terrible shape. He picks up the fluttering sack and excuses himself to go break the bird’s neck. “It’s the kindly thing to do.”

In Saudi Arabia, dogs are scorned and almost no one keeps a pet. But cleaning oiled birds has become an unexpected crowd-pleaser, particularly on Saudi television. Not only did such expatriates as Mac Phee volunteer, but so did Saudis. Grainger believes that the Jubayl center has been well worth the effort, if only for the “enormous public relations” impact on Saudi thinking about conservation. “I think that the Saudis have been quite amazed that other people really are concerned with the Saudi environment,” Grainger says.

British, Scottish, Dutch and U.S. veterinarians came in to treat sick birds and instruct volunteers. A team of ornithologists, mostly British, flew in to teach advanced bird-watching skills. The Saudi religious police descended, outraged that men and women worked together, but faded from view. Meanwhile, Desert Stormers from the U.S. military washed birds. Saudi Aramco set up animal collection centers. The recreation center swimming pool was stocked with live fish. The project has gone so well that the Saudi wildlife commission, after just five years in existence, plans to open a permanent research center for the Gulf. Still, part of its success was luck.

“We were expecting that the oil would affect huge numbers of mammals and turtles,” says Yousef I. Wetaid, a young botanist who is director of the rescue project. “But actually the numbers were less.”

Except for the birds. Most estimates of the total bird loss now run to 30,000 to 40,000, of a Gulf bird population of about 1 million. Yet this is a modest figure compared to deaths from the Exxon Valdez spill of up to 390,000 birds out of 1 million to 2 million in the affected area.

And one bird is not among them. It is the first moorhen to be found in the oil, so when it is brought to the center, it becomes Moorhen No. 1 on the roster of 1,400 birds admitted so far.

Dr. Kunitoshi Baba, owner and chief veterinarian of a five-story animal hospital in Kawasaki City, Japan, comes to the moorhen’s rescue. A no-nonsense, quick-fingered animal doc, Baba will work here for the next two months. In Kawasaki City, one floor of his hospital is devoted to wildlife. At this center, he says, he’ll see more oiled birds in a day than he’ll treat in a month in Japan.

After administering a toothbrush scrubbing with dish soap, Baba pokes a cotton swab in the bird’s nostrils and mouth. The mouth is pink and white. Oiled birds that try to clean themselves often end up with lethal balls of tar in their guts.

“Good, good. He’s going to be OK,” says the vet, hovering over his patient. With a brief grin at the bird, now drying under a light bulb, Baba returns to the more instructive work of an autopsy. Two weeks later, Moorhen No. 1, pecking at a hand that helped it, is let free on a clean beach, south of the spill.