When Brigham Young University professor J. Bonner Ritchie entered Kuwait City, he was surprised to see everything intact.
"I was a member of occupying forces in Germany after World War II, and that place looked like it had been in a war," Ritchie said. But Kuwait City was carefully being rebuilt by the Army Corps of Engineers.It was the oil fields that really caught his attention.
"I just wasn't prepared for what I saw," he said. "My lungs are still irritated from the burning petroleum."
But the burning oil isn't the main problem - it is the uncapped wells that continue to release oil to the surface.
"A lot of the burning wells are surrounded by 4-foot lakes of oil. You have to build a 5-mile road of sand to put the fires out," Ritchie said.When the Iraqi army entered Kuwait, many of the employees of the Kuwaiti Oil Company defected to the side of Iraq. They were the ones who started the 750 oil fires. And they did it in a way that would cause the most damage possible.
"I was talking to Larry Flack who is in charge of coordinating putting out the fires, and he claimed 90 percent of the fires will be out by March. That is the easy 90 percent. The remaining 10 percent is where they will not be able to cap the oil wells," Ritchie said.