Welcome to Sunday Matinee, where we highlight classic car reviews or other longer videos I find on YouTube. Kick back and enjoy this blast from the past.
It's not often that we here at Sunday Matinee Studios take a turn for the serious, but sometimes the heavier topics can also be the most fascinating. In 1991, as Saddam Hussein was high-tailing it out of Kuwait in an effort to save his own dictatorial behind (albeit temporarily), he decided that if he couldn't have Kuwait's oil, nobody could.
As the coalition military forces swept up into Iraq the first time, thousands of oil wells were set ablaze, their smoke darkening the sky. In the midst of all the chaos, civilian crews had to figure out a way to put out the fires, both quickly and safely. Put water on it? Blow it out? Just try and cap the wells somehow?
You'll have to watch to find out the ways in which they actually did it, but I thought that its pertinent to sometimes take a look at the way our oil consumption can have unforetold consequences, even if those consequences are the result of war.
When It Came To Oil, The War In The Gulf Began After Saddam Left