On a scrap of windswept prairie 11,000km from the Persian Gulf, in a small office where two stag trophies gaze down from the walls, Ronnie Roles is preparing for an American invasion of Iraq.
Roles is president of operations for Cudd Pressure Control, one of the three American companies that extinguished hundreds of oil well fires in Kuwait after the Persian Gulf War and lately have been in touch with the Pentagon about similar service in a possible war in Iraq.
Like his counterparts at the other companies, Boots & Coots International Well Control and Wild Well Control, Roles is making sure that men and equipment in the US and around the world could be sent to Iraq at a moment's notice. Administration officials and oil industry executives now worry that Saddam Hussein could similarly torch Iraq's oil fields if the US attacks, just as retreating Iraqi troops blew up 700 of Kuwait's 1,000 oil wells, sinking the country into a months-long night of roiling fire and black skies.
For all their experience amid such danger, the firefighting companies say that Iraq could pose some extraordinary new challenges. No one in the industry, for example, has worked on oil wells tainted by chemical or biological weapons. No one wants to enter booby-trapped fields. And no one is quite sure who will pay for salvaging Iraq's vast oil reserves, the second largest in the world after Saudi Arabia's.
"Initially, the problems would probably be the same as in Kuwait: whether there are working airports or water nearby to fight the fires," Roles said. "But with the fields there in Saddam's back yard, will he cause more problems, with things like mines at the wells?"
A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on any contact with oil firefighting companies, saying that the Defense Department does not discuss contingency plans or talks with private companies unless a contract is signed. "But it is part of our job to be ready for different situations," said the spokesman, Lieutenant Dan Heplage. "That's just prudent."
The Bush administration says that restoring Iraq's oil production is paramount to the US' long-term interests in the country and the Middle East as a whole. Revenues from oil exports would be crucial to reviving the economy if Saddam is ousted, and a healthy economy, in turn, would shore up political stability. So if Iraq's oil industry were damaged -- which is not a certainty but a possibility very much on the minds of American war planners -- companies that battle fires would need to get to the fields fast to limit the destruction.
Two fronts
"It's not unimaginable that the war effort would still be going on while we're in there," said Jerry L. Winchester, president and chief operating officer of Boots & Coots, which is based in Houston.
In the corridor around the corner from Winchester, some far-sighted employee has recently pinned up maps of Iraq's topography, oil fields and pipelines. The corporate art that fills the hallways of well-control companies like Boots & Coots is almost exclusively photos of pillars of flame over oil wells and the occasional offshore oil platform, shorn in half by an explosion and sinking into the sea.
Oilfield firefighters make no secret of the rush they get from walking into danger. Though the legendary Red Adair is no longer in business, the men who run this generation of companies are all his proteges. They are the rock stars in an industry that has become increasingly tame, high-tech and climate controlled. Yet even for them, there are fewer fires and blowouts than there used to be. Of the 40 to 60 well-control emergencies that Wild Well Control handles every year, for example, only about six of them rage into fires, said the chief executive, Pat Campbell.
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