[wayzel]

I lived several hours downwind of these fires in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia at the time and remember well the sun being blotted out for weeks on end. You couldn't smell it in the air but the daytime sky was a deep toxic orange, and, it was eerily dim, just like during the moments of a partial solar eclipse. Then the oil slicks and dead jellyfish began covering the beaches and we were told to minimize our time outdoors (obviously). "Being outside is like smoking two packs a day," we were told. The scale of these fires is hard to fathom, but many hundreds of wells were lit. We heard stories of specialized Texan and Louisianan firefighters living through hell and high water putting them out. Bulldozers' steel frames were insufficient to withstand the searing heat when in close proximity to the blazing well heads, not to mention the enclosed cabins being impossible for a human to survive within. Among their methods were to rig controlled explosions to starve the fires of oxygen and to use large metal domes affixed to specialized hydraulic arms to lower them onto the well heads and smother the flames.

[presidentender]

My favorite technique they used to extinguish the fires was to hoist a piece of well casing vertically over the flame, effectively raising it a few dozen feet into the air. Then they'd maneuver the bottom of the casing so the oil spraying from ground level wasn't near the flame, and the fire would be out.

[pinaceae]

A Hungarian team mounted two MIG21 jet engines on a Russian tank chassis and sprayed water through them.

Concept was called "Big Wind". Here it is in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Ss3BMrscE

[ghaff]

Explosives have been one of the traditional ways to extinguish oilfield fires (in addition to techniques like directional drilling to relieve the pressure feeding the fire). My understanding is that in Kuwait there was actually a good supply of water from the Persian Gulf so most of the fires were extinguished with very large quantities of water, sometimes sprayed by gas turbines.