.
Through the open cockpit door, I could see both pilots gesturing as they argued the whereabouts of the Kuwait International Airport. The view beyond the cockpit windows looked worse than a bad hangover - dark tendrils of greasy carbon shrouding a ruined city inged by clusters of winking firelights.
"Turn back!" I wanted to shout at the airman who gazed curiously at this VIP across the aisles of the otherwise empty transport. Face pressed back to the window, my entire body cringed. Someone had opened the taps to 10% of the world's oil reserves. Oil clogged the air, streaked the waters of Kuwait Bay below, blackened an encroaching desert alive with nearly a thousand gushing or burning oil wells. "Let's forget the whole..."
Kuwait City tipped steeply as the plane lined up for its final approach into hell. A bunker burned fiercely as we swept past the runway perimeter. As the main wheels thumped the runway, a fire-blackened control tower sailed past, its sleek facade riddled with shell-holes. A tank battle had been fought here five weeks before. Still some distance from the shattered terminal, the airplane swerved to a stop. Seconds later I found myself standing on the tarmac surrounded by a small mountain of gear. "Good luck!" a crewman shouted. The door slammed. The pilots gunned the engines and fled.
No tourist has ever felt so bewildered or forsaken as this lone eco-warrior marooned in his quixotic quest. Trudging toward the French fortifications at one end of a bullet-pocked concourse, I wondered yet again what one person could expect to accomplish in the midst of such overwhelming devastation?
Or even a band of three? Stung by the refusal of governments and the world's biggest environmental organizations to tackle an unprecedented "Eco War," this Canadian, a New Zealander and an American had each decided to act on his own. Under the auspices of a tiny Hawaii-based conservation group best known for its efforts to save dolphins and tigers, we linked up that afternoon in the Kuwait International Hotel.
The next morning found Earthtrust team leader Michael Bailey, ornithologist Rick Thorpe and myself bouncing in a battered rented truck past burned-out Iraqi tanks into the Great Bergan oilfield.
Though it was nearly noon, we were horrified to find ourselves driving in almost total darkness. All around us, hundreds of blown-up oil wells geysered orange flames hundreds of feet into a roiling black "oilcast."
We kept looking up for low-flying jets until we realized that the turbine-like shriek was the roar of high-pressure oil venting from the earth.
Nothing had prepared me for this. Never had I known such despair.
Nothing lived in this tarred and poisoned wasteland where once luxuriant shrubbery dripped with creosote. Though our immediate mission was to save some of the millions of waterbirds winging their way north from north Africa and the southern Gulf, the few survivors we saw were already too heavily oiled to rescue. An occasional raptor - wings weighted with the oil that caked its eyes - careened blindly into the heart of this great conflagration.
More than 200 species of birds - including grebes, plovers and flamingos - were winging up the oil-clogged coasts of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Some, like the Socotra Cormorant, were already endangered. Very few reached Kuwait. By early February, 1991, feeding areas for at least a quarter of a million wading birds on the Saudi Arabia coast had been ruined. Soot covered birds were found as far away as Siberia.-68
In early March, shortly after the world's biggest oil spill began washing ashore at al-Jubail, I had been in Dammam at the Saudi environmental headquarters when the first hard numbers listing all known sources of oil washing into the Gulf scrolled across an American scientist's computer screen. The 5.5 million barrel total - equal to 25 Exxon Valdez spills - far eclipsed the largest previous oil spill, which released 3.3 million barrels off the Mexican coast in 1979.-4 "One-third of this oil," the American told me, "is the result of allied bombing."
Flying through an eerie midday darkness, I made two coastal survey flights with the Saudi Air Force. Shivering in the unusual bitter cold, the stench of oil clogging our nostrils, we flew hour after hour at 100 knots. Not for a single moment did the American and Saudi observers fail to see heavy crude washing ashore from vast slicks extending beyond the horizon. Half of the Saudi coastline was heavily oiled; half of the precious mangrove and salt-marsh "nurseries" destroyed. When the helicopter landed, no one could speak.
Now, traversing the heart of this blazing darkness, it was clear that few birds had survived this stinking gauntlet. Walking almost daily through heavily mined coastal areas, our three-man survey party would count - over the next five weeks - dozens, a few hundred, perhaps 2,000 migrating birds. None could be saved.
We could have used some help ourselves. In the weeks and months following the "liberation" of a country deliberately sacrificed to goad a Western-created Frankenstein into suicidal aggression, four members of the Gulf Environmental Emergency Response Team, the U.S. conservation organization Earthtrust and the World Federation for the Protection of Animals were the sole hands-on international response to the biggest environmental catastrophe in modern times.
While Walsh set about saving the starving survivors of Kuwait's zoo and four fear-crazed horses from the emir's summer palace in the center of the Great Bergan oilfield, Bailey, Thorpe and myself opened the Kuwait Environmental Information Center in the lobby of the city's only functioning hotel. With all Kuwait government ministries paralysed by lack of phones, transport and personnel, our map-plastered room with its computers and constantly updated survey reports quickly became the defacto command center for environmental response in Kuwait.
Beside making continuous ground and aerial surveys with the Kuwait Air Force, our small team interviewed many of the fire-fighters, medical doctors and other specialists attracted to our information center. Their reports were disturbing. Though a United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) press briefing insisted that the choking midday darkness posed "no danger to human health," Dr. David Snashall of the U.K. Commonwealth Health Department warned a group of Kuwait's top scientists of "potentially catastrophic health effects" from toxic smoke and gases.
Official U.S. and Kuwaiti reassurances were hard to accept after flocks of birds began dropping dead onto city streets. When autopsied sheep in the town of Ahmadi revealed lungs as hard and blackened as shoe leather, people began asking: "what is happening to us?" Though no test data were yet being released by French, American or Chinese monitoring teams, Boston's National Toxics Campaigners reported unsafe levels of 1.4-dichlorobenzene, arsenic, zinc, cadmium and lead - 175 miles downwind from Ahmadi.-168/55
Six weeks after "victory" had been declared, admissions were up sharply at the Ahmadi hospital. As flames from burning oil wells across the street sent gouts of black smoke into the perpetual petroleum overcast, a senior administrator interrupted his denials of danger with frequent bouts of coughing. "Do you smoke?" I asked as we stood to leave. The doctor shook his head - certainly not. But according to other experts we interviewed, just breathing the air outside the hospital window was equivalent to smoking thousands of cigarettes a day.
After organizing scientists from the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research and dozens of high school students into the Kuwait Environmental Action Team (KEAT), we had the satisfaction of seeing a full public health survey carried out door-to-door in that stricken community. Almost all Ahmadi residents claimed to be suffering adverse health effects from more than 400 oil wells burning nearby; more than half wished to be evacuated.
On April 26, soon after an Earthtrust request brought the Gulf's only oil-spill recovery ship into Kuwait's al-Shuaiba port, I was aboard a KEAT survey flight which spotted a massive new slick moving south from Iraq. Loading scavenged oil booms onto a truck provided by the U.S. Army's 352nd Division, Rick Thorpe and I and an Egyptian chef from the hotel spent five days dragging the heavy boom across the fast-flowing estuary at al-Khiran.
We were in time to save Kuwait's principle wetlands from the brunt of a slick which soaked most of the Kuwait coastline. But by then, more than 460 miles of Arabian Gulf coastline had been heavily oiled.-246 Despite the efforts of U.S. marines who cleaned the beaches of Kara Island as the first Green and Hawksbill turtles began coming ashore to bury their eggs, hundreds of endangered turtles had been found dead in oily inshore waters.-246 In addition to the toxicity of oil and its smothering effects on mangrove and seagrass breeding grounds, a decrease of 10- to 18 degrees Farenheit over smoke-shaded Gulf waters further affected marine reproduction, leading to a decline in female turtle hatchings.-4 It also appeared that crude oil could have long term chronic effects leading to the death of coral reefs where fish and shellfish breed.-246 Even before the war, the Arabian Gulf was the world's most polluted waterway. With 25 large oil terminals loading more than 20,000 tankers a year, annual oil spills of 150,000 metric tons were regarded as "routine." Even before this latest Gulf conflict, fishmongers in Bahrain's sprawling indoor market joked that the 20 different species of Gulf fish they offered "were already oiled."
But oil has been used as a weapon in the Middle East since biblical times. The disastrous Iran-Iraq war, which saw the rocketing of Iran's Nowruz drilling platform in 1983, released more than a half-million barrels of oil into a shallow sea already heavily impacted by rapid urbanization, oil spills and algae blooms around desalination plants.
By the time Iraqi forces began pumping oil from Kuwait's Sea Island loading terminal directly into the sea, and allied warplanes had started bombing oil tankers and shore installations in the northern Gulf, Nowruz oil had congealed to the consistency of hard asphalt on beaches in Qatar and Bahrain. As Bahrain braced for on oncoming oil slick bigger than that entire island-nation, the region which had counted fisheries income second only to oil revenues began importing fish.
By the spring of 1991, the Saudi and Iranian shrimp, pearl and cod fisheries had failed. Widespread die-offs of the mangroves, salt marshes and seagrass "nurseries" had apparently decimated the anchovies, sardines and other small "bait fish" on which the popular barracuda, king mackerel and Hamour fed.-4 A Saudi fisheries expert warned that the Gulf would never recover from the effects of the world's biggest oil spill.
When thousands of floating mines prevented the deployment of the al-Wasit
oil recovery ship to al-Khiran, Thorpe and I ran a salvaged skiff upcoast into
the intake arms of one of Kuwait's three desalination plants. The oil slick we
found there - and in similar facilities along the Kuwait and Saudi coasts - was
potentially deadly. Dr. Schamadan of the U.S. National Cancer Research Institute
warned us that "if you
want to induce cancer in mice about the worst thing
you could give them is hydrocarbons mixed with chlorine" used in desalination
plants.
Plant officials told us not to worry - the actual seawater intakes are located two meters underwater. They seemed to have forgotten that as crude oil weathers and thickens, the resulting "tar balls" become neutrally buoyant, submerging to hover two to three meters below the surface.
Outside our bullet-holed apartment windows, small arms fire still crackled in the smoky gloom as I finished typing Kuwait's first post-war environmental impact assessment. Briefing members of the Kuwait cabinet and royal family along with Rick Thorpe and Michael Bailey, I warned that accelerating desertification and spreading oil lakes, combined with prolonged lack of sunlight, temperature drops up to 23 degrees Celsius and sticky "black rain" were seriously disrupting the region's ecology.
By late 1993, fully one-third of Kuwait was covered by plant-choking soot and "tarcrete." Oil vapor from the burning wells had mixed with soot and sand and hardened into a four inch-thick covering. In addition to this extensive desert disruption, NOAA also reported a doubling of the Gulf oil spill because of oil rain falling into that nearly landlocked sea, the official U.S. government agency also estimated that 252 oil pools containing 150 million barrels of oil covered more than half of Kuwait's land surface.-246 (Exxon Valdez spilled 250,000 barrels of crude.) Some of these oil lakes were eight kilometers long and eight meters deep. In late April, 1991, KEAT counted hundreds of desiccated carcasses around a single oil pool mistaken for water by desperate birds. Within a year, over one million migratory birds were feared killed after landing on oil-coated wetlands and desert oil pools.-246
In my impact assessment I also warned of extensive "ordnance pollution," which continues to haunt camels and people alike. Despite extensive post-war mine-clearing operations, Kuwait's shifting desert and beach sands remain infested with Iraqi mines, rockets and shells. In addition,one-third of the 100,000 tons of explosives dropped on Kuwait by coalition air forces also failed to explode in the soft desert sand.-4 In 1992, as many as 1,600 Kuwaitis were killed or wounded by exploding ordnance.-230
As the oil fires were extinguished by a growing international consortium of fire-fighters using high- pressure water, chemicals, explosives and even truck-mounted jet engines to snuff each towering inferno, another complication arose with the evaporation of lighter crude "fractions" from each oil gusher. Highly toxic near its source, the invisible vapor dispersed into unknown concentrations over Ahmadi and Kuwait City.-20
I was also worried about contamination of Kuwait's vast fresh water acquifer, which comes within 15 feet of the desert surface. The benzene, toluene and napthalene found in Kuwaiti "sweet" crude saturating those sands are highly toxic carcinogens;-218 a small amount is enough to poison groundwater. Opening a bottle of "pure, distiled" Saudi Arabian water at the information center one afternoon, we recoiled from the pungent reek of kerosene. The entire case was poisoned. An American officer who had come by for a briefing read the bottle's label and immediately requested samples. "That's the same water I'm giving my men," he told us.
Despite pleas to General Schwartzkopf and other high-ranking U.S. Army commanders, we were unable to get the orders issued which would have mobilized tens of thousands of idle troops and the huge truck-parks brimming with bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment awaiting shipment back to the 'States.
Nor were the world's major environmental groups interested in joining our monitoring and remediation efforts in the Gulf. For them, this environmental front-line was too "hot" physically and politically to get immediately involved. With "peace" and "environmental" issues overlapping in a single concern, the bureaucracies of these environmental organizations became paralysed with fear that criticism of the ecological holocaust in the Middle East would be seen as somehow siding with Saddam.
As the primary source of current information on the region's rapidly deteriorating environmental situation, our three-man response team briefed journalists, government officials, corporate representatives, military commanders and visiting delegations. Though an EEC investigative committee were sympathetic to our call for help, they informed us that revealing the true costs of what had been portrayed by the "victorious" governments as a "quick and clean" surgical victory was simply "too political" for European Economic Community involvement.
We thought we would do better with UNEP. After all, the United Nations was already spending money lavishly on personnel and transport in Kuwait - and here was a UN agency set up specifically to deal with environmental concerns. Who better to help organize an immediate and effective environmental response than the United Nations Environment Program?
We should have known better. After "hushing up" the warnings of top world scientists regarding the possible ecological consequences of Operation Desert Storm,-77 UNEP officials had been quick to downplay adverse health effects from the oil fires. Soon after arranging a helicopter overflight for visiting UNEP delegates in mid-April, Rick Thorpe and I briefed them on the current situation aboard the al-Wasit.
But the UNEP party seemed more interested in photographing each other aboard the oil spill cleanup ship than in examining the chart of Kuwait's heavily oiled coastline.
That evening, Kuwait Institute of Scientific Research scientists Sami al-Yakoob and Jassem al-Hassan and the three Earthtrust team members gave a final briefing to the UNEP representatives at the environmental information center. "We have an action plan drawn up," we told the UN officials. "With just a few more people and a little money we could do a great deal to address Kuwait's most urgent environmental concerns."
After reassuring us that they "had lots of money," the head of the UNEP delegation told us that none would be coming our way. UNEP, he said, would "study the matter further," before drawing up their own "action plan" in September. The room erupted in angry shouts from KISR scientists and other action team members. "This is not a problem to be studied," I loudly informed the UN politicos. "This is an emergency which must be addressed now!"
...Soon after the ceasefire was signed, UN observers declared this salient river "dead." The principle source of the region's drinking and irrigation water had been poisoned by the bombing of Iraq's principle nerve gas factory at Samarra, some 25 miles upwind. Another primary fresh water source - Lake Mileh Tharthar - had also been ruined by the destruction of the Samarra plant.-55
Sarin, Tabun and mustard gas are potent chemical warfare agents, capable of saturating concrete and other structures with compounds which can threaten health for years. Toxic constituents of the Iraqi chemical attack which wiped out the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988 were still active four years later.-58
The UN team also suspected that the Tigris River was radioactive.
Though they declined to reveal their test data, the U.S. government confirmed the presence of radioactivity in Baghdad following the bombing of a nuclear power plant in a suburb north of the city.-188 Additional radiation exposure is already haunting Iraqi and Kuwaiti children who have played among the 40 tons of depleted uranium rounds
left on the battlefields by coalition tanks.-188 According to the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, there is enough depleted Uranium 238 in Kuwait and Iraq to cause "tens of thousands of deaths."-189 Dubbed "the Agent Orange of the '90s," depleted uranium anti-tank rounds burn on impact, spreading uranium oxide dust that is chemotoxic and low-level radioactive. Ingested or inhaled, these particles can trigger kidney disease and cancer.-138
While the subsequent UNEP investigation on the environmental damage of Gulf war has been "remarkably silent" on the subject of U 238 poisoning,-189 the test-firing of U 238 "penetrator" rounds remains fiercely opposed in Minnesota and South Dakota after earlier test-firings apparently contaminated groundwater in New Mexico.
Associate director of the U.S. Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, James Parker, has warned that the depleted-uranium tank shells "could result in the permanent contamination of the land."-21?
[Thousands] of U.S. soldiers exposed to broken or expended depleted uranium shells were neither warned nor trained to deal with uranium hazards.-123 In addition to this chemo-radiation danger, cyanide, organochlorines, nitrogen dioxide, dioxins and heavy metals were also released in massive quantities during tens of thousands of bombing raids.
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