January 19, 1996
Web posted at: 1 a.m. EST
From Correspondent Richard Blystone
KUWAIT (CNN) -- Five years ago during the Persian Gulf War, the soil and the sky of Kuwait were black from burning oil. As a final gesture before they fled, the Iraqi occupiers of Kuwait set fire to hundreds of oil wells. Some environmentalists predicted terrible consequences: a global winter under the shade of the smoke cloud and mass poisoning. Today, scientists say they still do not know the extent of the damage.
"We think that God has laid in nature a huge amount of resilience that you cannot destroy easily."
-- Abdulrahman al Awadi
Oil, which had been the blessing of the nation's economy, became the curse of its ecology when combat and sabotage unleashed more than a billion barrels of crude oil on the Arabian Gulf and its hinterland.
There were massive oil slicks, calling on every trick oilmen could devise, and all the money they could spend, to contain the disaster.
Wildlife had no such ingenuity, and suffered considerably.
Dr. Abdulrahman al Awadi has become a world expert on catastrophic oil pollution. He'd have preferred to have earned that status some other way, but his lab was dumped in his back yard.
"There is such a damage that I think the scientists up till now cannot say 'this is the limit,' because as time goes on we're discovering more and more," al Awadi says.
The fires are out and the oilfields mostly cleaned up, but no one knows about the long-term effects of so much oil damage.
A public park in Kuwait, once vibrant with life, is now home to few living things, plant or animal. Al Awadi says that the fires were more devastating because of the nature of a desert ecology. "Because (the) desert is such a very difficult place for these things to survive ... they are always at the edge, at the brink of instability," he says.
At the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, scientists are studying the effects on humans of breathing half-burned oil.
Dr. Fatimah al Abdali says it's too early now to say if there are new cases of cancer, but he has his suspicions. "After seven months or more than 10 months of inhaling such ... pollutants in our environment, we have expectation for, if not the same diseases, but maybe new diseases," she says. (112K AIFF sound or 112K WAV sound)
The burned Kuwaiti oilfields will never be restored to normalcy, but there are a few spots that show the great healing power of nature. Grasses, even in autumn, bring shades of green to earth that was black. And some plants have benefited from a limited dose of what killed others.
"The soot and the carbon are basic in their nature," al Awadi says. "Most of our land here is actually calcium carbonate. It's a little bit acidic also in nature, so it was a neutralizing effect. When the rains came down, the desert started to bloom.
"We think that God has laid in nature a huge amount of resilience that you cannot destroy easily."(73K AIFF sound or 73K WAV sound)
The waters of the Gulf are blue again, though oil tankers in normal times lose an estimated 20,000 barrels a day.
Kuwaiti fishermen whose forefathers have fished here generation after generation say that their catches have dwindled to one-fifth of what they were before.
In front of his beach cottage, al Awadi has been experimenting to see how nature mends itself by plowing over the beach every year. He enlists petroleum-eating microbes that can only work in the presence of oxygen.
But below the plowed surface, the oil will stay for many more years, making it impossible to till Kuwait's coastline.
It will also be years before scientists truly know the extent to which the war has damaged Kuwait's environment. The humble lower end of the ecological chain is still mute, and nature's last word has not been spoken.
Copyright © 1996 Cable News Network, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
