Giving a horrific new meaning to the term “oil war,” Saddam Hussein last week ordered a massive attack against the Persian Gulf itself. The Iraqis opened the pumps at Sea Island Terminal, a supertanker loading dock almost 10 miles off the Kuwaiti coast that can discharge at least 100,000 barrels of crude a day. They also pulled the plugs on five Kuwaiti tankers, loaded with 3 million gallons of petroleum, berthed at al-Ahmadi. “This threatens to be more than a dozen times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill,” said Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams. (All told, the Valdez poured 260,000 barrels of crude–10.8 million gallons–into Alaskan waters.) “It is clearly an act of environmental terrorism.” President Bush denounced the ploy as “sick” and “desperate.” The Sierra Club called it “an unconscionable act” that" could destroy the gulf for decades."
Then, three days after Saddam opened the taps, the slick burst into something even more hellish. Billows of black smoke streamed up from flames around the tanker terminal, hovered above the gulf and swept over Iran. There was no word on who had torched that part of the slick. Over the weekend the White House dispatched a team of experts to advise the Saudis on fighting the spill, and American F-111s bombed pipelines linking the Kuwaiti oilfields with the offshore terminal, in an effort to cut off the flow.
American military sources speculated that Saddam unleashed the gusher to foil any amphibious liberation of Kuwait. Pentagon officials said the slick would not prevent such an assault, and Bush declared, “There is no military advantage to him whatsoever in this.” Still, the allies would have to factor the oil flood into their battle plans. The vents on amphibious tractors that would carry soldiers onto the beaches would be fouled by oily water. Unless special piping were added to the vents, soldiers would have to assume exposed positions atop the vehicles to manually clear the intake and exhaust valves.
Over the weekend the blaze seemed to be burning itself out. That still left tons of oil on the waters–and the fear that the Iraqis could torch it to deter allied naval operations with a wall of fire. But that’s no easy trick: spread-out oil is hard to ignite. If it did burn, smoke would not cause serious problems for the allies’ “smart” weapons, Desert Storm’s commander, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, told “Newsweek.’ Only Maverick air-to-ground guided missiles, whose infrared homing devices could be fooled by the heat from burning oil, and the BGU-15 bomb that is guided by TV images or infrared radiation might be hampered. “It’s not a war stopper at this point,” concluded Maj Gen. Robert Johnston, chief of staff of the U.S. Central Command, at a briefing in Riyadh.
Even if the spill does not stymie military operations, it could hamper the Saudi economy. The gushing crude threatened to clog the intake valves of power plants, which use gulf water for cooling. Because petrochemical and other industrial plants also cool their machinery with sea water, the spill might “create havoc within the gulf’s economic life…bringing to a halt normal economic activity,” says Richard Golob, publisher of Golob’s Oil Pollution Bulletin.
The spill could close down desalination units on which many gulf nations–and the troops of Desert Storm–depend for drinking water. Of the three government-run desalination plants in Saudi’s Eastern Province, the Khafji facility had been shut on Jan. 15 because the civilian population it served had been evacuated just before Desert Storm; by the weekend the ooze of oil had reached the Khafji intake valves. In another week or two it could reach the Jubail plant, which pumps 800,000 tons of water daily to supply Riyadh and its industrial satellites. Although oil booms ring the plants–a legacy of decades of spills in the gulf–tar balls and submerged oil can slip underneath. American troops need the water not only for drinking but for decontamination after a chemical attack. The Army has dug wells in the Saudi desert; still, says a Pentagon source, “if they foul up the plants, it puts a crimp on our water supplies.” Saudi crews were fighting the edges of the slick with chemical dispersants, but “we are not sure how effective we will be in containing it,” says Abdul Hamid Al-Mansour of the Saline Water Conservation Corp. in the Eastern Province. “We may have to shut the plant down.”
For many environmentalists, the disaster was a horrible realization of their worst fears. Ever since Bush ordered troops to the gulf, scientists have warned of the havoc that tanks could wreak on desert sands, the lethal rain that could splatter down after raids on chemical- and biological-weapons factories. But all along the most likely disaster involved oil–and Saddam’s track record showed he had no compunctions about using it. In 1983 Iraqi forces launched a rocket attack on Iran’s Nowruz offshore drilling platform and flooded the gulf with 2 million barrels of crude. That left a trail of dead animals and decimated the population of endangered sea cows, whose habit of nuzzling their young and slapping their tails on the sea surface inspired ancient mariners to spin tales of mermaids.
The immediate victim of last week’s sabotage was the gulf ecosystem, one of the world’s most fragile. Because it is so shallow–an average of 110 feet deep–and nearly enclosed, it takes a staggering 200 years to flush out. In contrast, Prince William Sound receives all-new water every few days. Thus the gulf spill is not subject to the natural cleansing that helped mitigate the Valdez accident. The slick will contaminate sea-grass beds that provide food for marsh birds, ruin rare mangrove stands, and cripple the gulf’s multimillion-dollar shrimp and fishing industry.
The eight-mile-wide oblong of crude headed for the sandy beaches of the southern gulf. There, the lack of energetic wave action means that oil washing up on shore will remain, forming viscous tar balls and mats, at least until detergent-wielding cleanup crews arrive. As the lighter fractions of spilled oil evaporate, a tarry mass will remain behind and sink to the bottom, says Mark Pokras of Tufts University, who has treated animals hurt by oil spills. “Much of the tar will sink, destroy[ing] coral reefs and other bottom-dwelling marine life–the food for fish and wildlife,” he predicts. The ultimate effect, says Brent Blackwelder of the environmental group Friends of the Earth, will be like “paving the gulf in asphalt.”
The principal lesson of the Valdez fiasco was that a terrible oil spill becomes catastrophic unless quickly contained. The longer floating oil mixes with water and gets whipped by wind, the more it emulsifies, turning into a goopy brown mousse that resists containment and destruction. Yet despite Valdez, and despite Saddam’s threats, the gulf nations are ill-prepared to battle a massive, intentional release. Gulf spills are normally the responsibility of the Gulf Area Oil Companies Mutual Aid Organization, with 10 member companies from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the smaller emirates. But the group has nowhere near enough containment booms, skimmers, barges and other cleanup equipment in or near the gulf to contain a gusher like the one Saddam has uncorked. Even if it did, responding to a spill is not a high priority when Scuds are flying; sometimes it is outright impossible. “[The spill] is in enemy territory,” said chief of staff Johnston. “We can’t just go in and shut it off.”
The best way to fight spreading crude is to do what cars and furnaces do with oil: burn it. “That’s the most efficient way to get rid of oil very fast,” says Alan A. Allen, an oil-spill specialist in Seattle who worked on the Valdez cleanup. He burned more than 20,000 gallons on the second day of that accident. But an oils slick sustains combustion only if it is at least one millimeter thick; often it spreads out to less than that. The first task, then, is to surround the slick with fireproof booms and corral it. A military airlift could ferry the 20,000 to 30,000 feet of fireproof containment booms from Alaska to Saudi Arabia in less than a day–but at the end of the week, almost all the containment booms in the entire world remained in Alaska. Once the crude in contained, it could be ignited by helicopters. With a properly controlled burn, says Allen, " you’re looking at 95 to 98 percent elimination.”
By the end of the week the slick covered more than 250 square miles. The Pentagon did not know how much more oil remained in the al-Ahmadi storage tanks that feed into the Sea Island Terminal, but there was frightening evidence that Saddam had more ecoterror in mind. Several months ago intelligence satellites spotted the Iraqi Army extending an oil pipeline from the northern Kuwait oil network part way across the bridge to Bubiyan Island. “Our concern is that they’ll slick the whole northern Persian Gulf,” says a Marine officer. That would give Saddam little military advantage. But it would turn a war between national into one against the planet itself.
The world unfortunately gets plenty of experience in cleaning up oil spills. A few methods of dealing with the crises stand out, but each poses problems of its own:
Burning works so long as the slick is thicker than one millimeter; as the slick spreads and thins, it will not sustain the flames.
Chemical dispersants can break up a spill (and the Saudis are using them) but they must be used before the oil mixes with too much water and air.
Containment booms corral oil so it can be skimmed or burned. But most of the world inventory of fireproof boom is in Alaska.
