PETER PAWINSKI

In February 1991, having gutted and pillaged Kuwait City, the fleeing Iraqi Army sets off explosive charges at the heads of more than 700 Kuwaiti oil wells, igniting geysers of oil and sending brilliant yellow flames as high as 300 feet into the air. For some 30 weeks, these fires unleash up to 5000 tons of billowing black smoke a day into the bleak desert landscape, creating an apocalyptic, inky plume 800 miles long.

Smoke from the oil fires turns the desert day into night. The only relief from the darkness is the eerie flames themselves. From pools some 4000 feet below the earth's surface, where it collected 100 million years ago, the oil shrieks up and out of the earth with an awful primal scream and a terrible force, like an air hose that's been severed, only a hundred times louder.

The fires reach temperatures of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. The air around the fires heats to a shimmering 650 degrees, and the sand at the base of the fires can reach a stupefying 1300 degrees.

The waste was immense-five to six million barrels a day, or as much as 250 million gallons of oil. It surges upward with such force that all the oil doesn't ignite, and the unburned excess bleeds off and forms vast black lakes. There were 240 of these lakes containing a total 20 million barrels of oil, all of them capable of catching fire were some incendiary to go off in the vicinity.

Imagine trying to approach these wells. Many of them are surrounded by acres of a solidified residue, a byproduct of the fires: indescribably hot, rock-hard mounds of coke. Now imagine this: In the midst of all that searing sand and bubbling oil and these firebolts of flame raging upward into a day that turns black with choking smoke, there are some 20,000 unexploded cluster bombs and mines, leftovers of the war, all just waiting to go boom, capable of turning the lakes of oil into an inferno of Dantean dimensions.

There is so much oil that this nightmare of flame and smoke could go on for 15,695 days-that's 43 years-before finally exhausting every drop of Kuwait's 94-billion-barrel underground reserve.

Into this scene ambles an old Soviet tank, clanking and rattling and squeaking along at 3 mph. Walking not far from it is a man in what looks like a spacesuit. The tank is a T-34 of World War II vintage, made unforgettable 60 years ago-at least to the German Army, when its soldiers watched in horror as their shells bounced harmlessly off it. Today, it will come in handy if someone asks you to put out a fire designed in hell.

The original turret of the tank is gone, replaced by a platform on which a pair of MiG-21 fighter-plane engines are mounted, each 10 feet long. At the back of that platform is a small control cabin with room for just one operator. Above the MiG engines are six water nozzles that stick out like a pair of giant forks. A fire hose feeds water to the tank from a reservoir not far away. Hundreds of these reservoirs had to be dug to fight all the fires, and this one holds four million gallons of water. The reservoir gets its saltwater from a pipeline that runs 90 miles to the Arabian Gulf.

Ever so gently, this 46-ton tank, with 800 gallons of flammable kerosene (a.k.a. jet fuel) sloshing around in one tank and a similar load of diesel in another-crawls along like a monster tortoise toward the flames and the unearthly howl of noise. When it's within 25 feet of the vertical flame, it stops.

Another deafening noise is added to this scene when the MiG engines, which have been idling, are revved up, producing a ghastly whistle of 130 decibels of sound, the threshold where loudness becomes disablingly painful. The two engines gobble almost half a gallon of kerosene a second to thrash out an enormous 27,000 pounds of thrust, and it is this exhaust-4591 cubic feet of it per second, blasting out of the jet engines at the speed of sound, about 770 mph-that will attack the oil fires. Park a family sedan in front of this machine, rev the MiGs, and those engines will blow out the windows and buckle bits of bodywork before bowling the car over.

Then the water is turned on, the six nozzles above the MiG engines unleashing an immense blast of water that mingles with the jet exhaust and becomes a ferocious spray of steam. The water is moving at a maximum rate of 220 gallons of water a second, or twice what an average U.S. household uses in 24 hours. (If you hooked up this machine's water pump to a typical suburban swimming pool, it would suck it dry in about 50 seconds.)

The fire is killed by severing the supply of oil to the flame. The first 15 to 30 feet of oil streaming upward from the wellhead doesn't burn because it travels too fast for oxygen to mix with it and ignite. Cut through that oil flow with the immense jet exhaust, and the fire will die. Then the steam cools the air around the well, helping to prevent reignition. A spark can restart the inferno, as often happens when oil teams, drenched in gushing oil, are trying to recap a well. The risk is real-one Romanian team in Kuwait did find itself suddenly engulfed in flames, although the men got out alive, preserving the zero-fatality rate among firefighters here. And so, in a few minutes, it's over. And the tank, clankety-clank, its armored body cracking noisily from cooling, trundles off, victorious again.

This unique firefighting tank, which is fondly called "Big Wind" by some and "Windy" by others, has its own multicultural history. The tank is Russian, the owner is the Arab-owned Hungarian company MB Drilling, a division of the MB Group of Oman, and it was created in 1991 in a town 50 miles southeast of Budapest.

It is based on a Russian idea. For years, the Soviets had blown out gas- and oil-well fires and cleared snowbound airfields by using a single MiG-15 jet engine bolted onto the bed of a truck. But it wasn't always powerful enough to defeat big blazes. Enter Windy, with two jet engines fixed to the more stable chassis of a tank.

The tank was to be used against well fires in Hungary, but the Gulf War erupted almost at the moment of its creation, and Windy was soon drafted (so to speak) and flown off in a C-130 cargo carrier to the blazing oil fields of Kuwait. Also dispatched with the vehicle were three middle-aged Hungarian firefighters who work for the MB Drilling Company. In 43 days in Kuwait, the Hungarian crew would put out nine fires and recap the wells.

Windy needs three crewmen: a driver inside the tank to steer and stop it; a controller in a rear cabin at the back of the platform to run the jet engines and the water jets; and a fire chief who walks about 15 feet away, issuing orders to the two other crew members through a remote-control unit.

As Windy was rolled out of its transporter in Kuwait, some 27 other teams that were fighting the fires stopped to gawk. They were from as far away as China and Canada, and they'd never seen anything like Windy. These crews-including one led by the famous oil-fire fighter, the Texan Red Adair-used explosives to stop the fires. One tactic was to pack 250 pounds of explosives into a 55-gallon oil drum welded onto the end of a long boom to place it by the well. The explosion robs the blaze of its oxygen, and the fire goes out. We asked Nandor Somlai, the 53-year-old Hungarian who heads Windy's crew, which system is better, and he replied, "Would you really want to walk up to a 2000-degree flame through burning heat and oil rain carrying explosives?"

Most of the Hungarian crew members' time in Kuwait was spent preparing for the firefight. First, they needed water. A company was called in to dig huge holes in the desert, the reservoirs, which were lined with plastic. At each reservoir, two diesel engines producing 1381 horsepower were set up to power a water pump. The water surged to the tank's platform via two pipes, and from there, six pipes fed it to three nozzles above the exhaust of each jet engine.

In the Gulf War, the tank fired 8000 gallons of water a minute, and there was also a 20-minute spray to cool down the area after a blaze was put out. Sounds simple, but the tank had to make numerous approaches before it could zap the blaze, primarily to blow away the surrounding coke mounds to gain access and give the fire chief a close view of the damage at the wellhead.

It's been three days since the tank arrived at the site of a burning well, and now it's about to begin a final approach and put out its first fire. It must draw very close to the tremendous blaze. "The bigger the fire, the closer we have to go," says fire chief Somlai.

The two Hungarians who will man the tank-the driver, Tamas Debreczeni, 54, and the platform controller, Istvan Seres, 48-now don F1-style gear: crash helmets (surprisingly, without earplugs), gloves, Nomex underwear, racing overalls-all for a drive of about 500 yards at 3 mph.

Debreczeni squeezes through a small opening just 23-by-31 inches into the front of the tank. On the platform overhead are the jet engines and the water jets. He closes the 1.58-inch-thick steel furnace hatch behind him. (For the record, that T-34 tank was retired after the gulf fires. Today, the hatch slams against the 3.9-inch-thick armor of a 50-year-old VT-55A tank. The same MiG platform used in the Gulf War still wobbles above.)

Once inside, Debreczeni twists downward where he'll sit on a thinly padded seat surrounded by controls. Behind him are two large, pressurized air tanks, but they contain air, not pure oxygen, which can make you high. The tanks are used only when a well is cooking up deadly gases such as carbon monoxide.

Reaching for a red button above him, Debreczeni sends pressurized oil into the bearings of the vehicle's 500-hp. 40.0-liter V-12 before it thunders to life. A cloud of exhaust smoke billows from the tailpipe and through the "spark catcher" at the end-metal gauze that stops sparks from igniting any oil around Windy.

Meanwhile, Seres, the platform controller, makes his way up a steel ladder to the control cabin at the back of the platform. Inside, looking out through heat-reflecting glass, he can see the MiG engines and the steel cage at the intakes that prevent various forms of life and hard hats from getting a brief and messy tour of how a MiG engine works. He can also see the fire nozzles above the jets. What he can't see from his seat is the scary part-a double-skinned, heat-shielded tank in front of his cabin carrying the huge load of kerosene.

But it's not Seres, but rather Somlai, the fire chief walking about 12 feet to one side of Windy, who decides when and how to use his arsenal. He is wearing a heat-reflecting fire suit, and in his thickly gloved hands he has a remote-control unit that is plugged into the back of Windy. With all the noise, he must communicate with the platform controller by pressing buttons on his remote unit, which in turn lights up the platform controller's console. The controller then presses the illuminated buttons on his own console to carry out the order.

It is dark inside the tank, and Debreczeni is staring at the tiny console before him. There are green LED arrows that point in all directions, and the fire chief will send signals to illuminate those arrows in the direction he wants to go. Debreczeni relies completely on the chief-he doesn't even glance out the two periscopes to see where he's going.

Green light! Debreczeni clanks the tank into first gear. The only forward gear. (Higher speeds could overstress the platform, so the other forward gears have been removed.) A tiny red light comes on near the visor of his helmet; the light will go on with every order made by the chief to either crewman to confirm that they haven't missed the order.

With a honk from Debreczeni, the vehicle shuffles slowly forward. The next order arrow illuminates at 90 feet from the blaze. The noise from the well grows closer, louder. At 85 feet, a piercing whistle is heard in both crewmen's headphones, another check that is shrieked every 15 seconds, which Debreczeni and Seres must acknowledge with a squeeze of a button to confirm all is okay. At 80 feet, the noise swells, the heat presses in. Seres presses the buttons that increase the MiGs' revs and start the water spray to fend off the temperatures.

Outside, the chief can see the wellhead. At 60 feet, the heat inside the tank is oppressive, and at 40 feet, the controls cannot be touched without gloves. At 30 feet, it's a tossup what's worse, the noise or the heat. Then, at 25 feet, the red light for "stop" comes on. Debreczeni applies the parking brake-a crude lever that locks down the foot brake.

Time is now everything. This close-and even with the heat-deflecting shields below the MiG engines and others encasing the kerosene tanks-the tanks are in danger of overheating after 20 minutes of exposure to these temperatures. Somlai commands Seres to point the MiGs at the spot above the wellhead. The MiGs rev to 7/10ths. He could crank them all the way up, but away from their subzero environment in the freezing atmosphere, for which they were designed, the MiGs will overheat quickly.

The noise is deafening. The jets blast away at the fire, and suddenly, there is one less fire in the Kuwaiti desert. The air is still charged with choking heat. Inside, surrounded by untouchably hot armor plating, Debreczeni waits patiently for the 20-minute spray-down, still acknowledging the shrill safety whistle in his ears every 15 seconds. Finally, a green light appears, pointing backward. He shifts into reverse and clankety-clanks away from the sizzling site. And that, according to the fire chief, "is the easy bit." Now comes the real work: recapping the well. And that involves fitting a new wellhead into place under a constant hail of oil. But that's another story.

BIG WIND HUNGARIAN FIREFIGHTER: CZECH VT-55A CHASSIS AND RUSSIAN MiG-21 JET ENGINES

VEHICLE TYPE: mid-engine, 2-track-drive, 2-passenger, 1-hatch armored mother of all firetrucks

ESTIMATED BASE PRICE: $3,000,000 (includes training, fire suits, remote units, headache-inducing buzzer safety system)

ENGINES:

TRACTION: 40.0-liter diesel V-12, 580 hp

FIRE-FIGHTING: twin MiG-21 Tumansky R-25 turbojets producing 27,000 pounds of thrust

TRANSMISSION: 1-speed manual

DIMENSIONS:

Length: 418.9 in Width: 171.3 in Height: 157.5 in Curb weight: 92,600 lb

C/D-ESTIMATED PERFORMANCE:

Zero to 60 mph: in your dreams, cowboy

Top speed (vehicle-integrity limited): 3 mph

Time to suck dry a suburban swimming pool: 50.0 sec

After fire, time to charbroil a T-bone on its armor: 45.0 sec

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io