On 17 January 1991, US-led coalition forces launched Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. By mid-February, as a ground offensive became imminent, the Iraqi regime put into effect its ‘Plan for Deferred Destruction’ (khittat al-takhrib al-muʾajal ), which entailed detonating Kuwait's oil wells. When the war ended on 26 February, 735 of around 870 active wells were ablaze and burned 5 million barrels of oil per day for the next nine months. It was initially estimated that it could take five to ten years to extinguish the fires, which, if left alone, could burn for over a hundred years. The first team of American oil firefighters sent by the Kuwaiti government immediately after the liberation to assess the damage got the first glimpse of the enormous task that lay ahead. As Joe Bowden, Sr, founder of Wild Well Control, put it:

One of Bowden's firefighters, George Hill, thought that Joe had ‘lost his mind … his ability to converse – you know, his vocabulary’.

The incomprehensibility and indescribability of Kuwait's burning oil fields reflects the ‘intellectual vertigo’ that characterises the global oil and gas sector. Despite the ubiquity of oil in our everyday lives, ‘the inner workings’ and ‘infrastructural guts’ of the industry remain largely invisible to the vast majority of the world's population, and the full ‘scale and reach’ of the world oil sector is therefore ‘impossible to fully grasp’. Like the oil industry itself, the crisis of the oil fires at first glance appeared impossible to comprehend in its totality. Neither the world nor the industry had ever seen a man-made crisis of this magnitude. But while the dizzying scale of the catastrophic destruction seemed incomprehensible, like other oil-related crises the fires paradoxically made oil itself more visible and tangible than ever before. Kuwait's oil infrastructure lay outside the physical boundaries of the city's metropolitan zone in heavily restricted areas.