Getting Blacker Every Day

By EUGENE LINDEN

The dead are buried. The wounded have been treated. But the devastation wrought by Saddam Hussein's demented destruction of Kuwait's oil wells has only just begun. Three months after Iraqi troops began blowing up 600 wells in Kuwait, an estimated 500 fires are still burning, perpetuating the most hellish man-made inferno the earth has ever seen. As fire fighters struggle to quench the flames, a job that may take two years, the toll on the region's environment and the health of its people will continue to rise.

While initial fears that the fires might disrupt the global climate by causing a "nuclear winter" have vanished, some scientists are making new predictions that catastrophic effects could be felt hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles beyond Kuwait's borders. Researchers still have little information about the size of the giant black cloud of oil, gases, soot and smoke being pumped into the atmosphere hour after hour, day after day. But they now fear that what happens to this noxious mass during the next few weeks may affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

The gulf region is about to enter a particularly delicate period, when the shamal winds in Iran, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula create huge sandstorms that blow southward. This year's storms could suck up soot from the oil fires and unusually large amounts of dirt loosened by explosions and the movement of armies during the war. Intensified by heat from the fires, the storms could spread a mist of soot and oil across a belt of countries, ranging from Saudi Arabia to India. Apart from posing a health threat to the people closest to ground zero, the pollution is likely to harm wildlife, agriculture and fisheries. At worst, fallout from the oil fires may disrupt the region's annual monsoon rains.

No matter what happens, Saddam Hussein has already become the most significant player on the world environmental scene in 1991. At a time when nations are trying to muster the will to control greenhouse gases and thus reduce the threat of global climate change, Saddam's eco-terrorism raised the amount of carbon dioxide that humans are pumping into the atmosphere by up to 2%. Kuwait's fires are putting out as much CO2 as all the cars, homes and industries of France. While these emissions will stop when the fires are put out, the gas will remain aloft for 100 years. Trying to reduce CO2 output by an equivalent amount will be difficult, even for the world's largest economies, says Rafe Pomerance, a senior associate at Washington's World Resources Institute.

A more pressing worry for the people of the gulf region is the unknown health effects of the pall of pollution. Not only have black smoke and ash darkened Kuwait's midday skies, but unburned and partially burned oil is also spewing from the wellheads. Someone standing near the al-Ahmadi oil field will find his shirt quickly covered with malignant black droplets that fall like an epoxy rain. The heat of the fires pushes much of the unburned oil high into the sky; it has rained down as far away as Qatar, 645 km (400 miles) to the south, and appeared as black snow in the Indian state of Kashmir, 2,600 km (1,600 miles) to the east.

The oil mist can be as deadly as it is ugly. It coats the leaves of palm trees, starving them for sunlight, and so they shrivel. It falls on the surface of the Persian Gulf, already assaulted by oil spills and acid rain, posing a further threat to the phytoplankton that is the base food supply for the region's abundant fisheries. And it enters the air passages and lungs of all breathing creatures. Kuwaitis who have seen the blackened lungs of slaughtered animals and watched livestock and wildlife sicken and die can only wonder what effect the ubiquitous mist is having on humans.

Some hospitals have reported a dramatic increase in respiratory cases. Doctors in al-Ahmadi are seeing a rise in bronchitis and three times the usual number of asthma victims. Dr. Edward Beattie, a lung specialist at New York City's Beth Israel Medical Center, says there may also be cases of oil pneumonia, a potentially fatal ailment in which oil smothers the tiny air sacs in the lungs.

Kuwaitis are aware of the danger. Antipollution masks are selling for $30 in supermarkets, and guards at checkpoints keep their scarves wrapped permanently around their mouths and noses. The most hazardous mist, however, is almost invisible, which means that children and the impatient might unwisely drop their uncomfortable protective measures under the false assumption that the air is safe.

The effect of the pollution on weather patterns could be even more calamitous. Last week Farouk El-Baz, director of Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing, proposed a new theory of how the oil fires could hurt millions of people by affecting life-giving monsoons in July and August. El- Baz, who just completed a research trip to the gulf region, derives his ideas in part from an earlier analysis he did of the impact of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Soil stirred up by that conflict doubled the intensity and frequency of the shamal sandstorms. El-Baz believes that the much heavier bombing and widespread trench digging in the latest war produced the material for even more intense sandstorms, which will combine with oil mist and soot from the fires. He argues that the heat from the inferno has created a new high-pressure system, which might push the monsoon line farther south than its normal seasonal position. Furthermore, El-Baz fears that particles in the air might seed the clouds so that rain falls over the Indian Ocean rather than the adjacent land.

Such a disturbance of the monsoon would cause a major disaster. For instance, rains over the Ethiopian highlands supply 80% of the water that feeds the Nile. If those rains fell offshore, the tens of millions of people in that already drought-stricken region would suffer even more grievously. Parts of Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and India could be similarly affected.

The dynamics of the monsoon are so variable and complicated that even if the rains fail this summer, it will be difficult to prove that the oil fires caused the trouble. On the basis of fluctuations in Pacific Ocean temperatures, Jagadish Shukla, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Interactions, is predicting that this year's rains will be less than normal. Shukla and others wonder whether the heat from the fires is sufficient to affect a system as large as the monsoon. El-Baz readily admits that his theory is riddled with unknowns, but he asserts that the dispersion pattern of the dust and oil indicates that a high-pressure system, which could drive the grimy cloud southward, is already in place.

Even if the rains do come, the sulfur-laden smoke and soot may make the soil too acidic for crops to grow. Considering the scale of these threats, it is surprising that organized efforts to gather information about the fires are only just getting under way. Last week a team of scientists sponsored by the Defense Nuclear Agency, the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society, among others, began their first flights to analyze the composition, density and persistence of the smoke. One important question: Does the smoke naturally repel water or, as El-Baz and some other scientists suspect, actually seed clouds by providing nuclei for raindrops?

The Bush Administration seems to be downplaying the impact of the fires -- perhaps because it does not want to raise any doubts about the wisdom of the gulf war. A preliminary report issued last month by the Environmental Protection Agency admitted that particles in the smoke could be a "major hazard" but contended that there was little immediate risk to healthy Kuwaitis from noxious gases, a finding that astounded some observers. Physicist Henry Kendall, chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says the fires are burning with a poor 70% to 90% efficiency, guaranteeing that a stew of poisons is being shot into the atmosphere.

The White House has reason to be concerned about public opinion, since the Administration knew from the start that the oil blazes were a likely outcome of the war. As early as September, Saddam threatened to blow up the wells if the allies tried to retake Kuwait, giving the Administration ample time to decide whether the damage such sabotage would wreak on the environment was an acceptable risk. Now the people of the gulf region can do little but pray that the most dire predictions do not come to pass.

With reporting by Andrea Dorfman/New York and William Dowell/Cairo