The Wall Street Journal has a terrific article on the Kuwaiti firefighters who put out the first oil fires in souther Iraq last Monday. Unfortunately you have to be a paid subscriber to view it so I'll just quote a few choice excerpts:

"As oil-well fires were raging here last weekend, Brian Krause, president of Boots & Coots International Well Control Inc., was on hand to boast that his team of Texas firefighters would need just a few weeks to douse the blazes. But as the 47-year-old Mr. Krause talked -- decked out in his company's trademark red coveralls -- a team of Kuwaiti firefighters was already moving its equipment into Iraq's second-largest oil field, now under U.S. and British control. Braving minefields and ignoring reports of Iraqi guerrillas in the area, the Kuwaitis snuffed out the first fire on Monday, days before Mr. Krause was ready to roll. "We had all our equipment ready, and Boots & Coots didn't," says Aisa A. Bou Yabes, the chief firefighter for the state-owned Kuwait Oil Co. Mr. Bou Yabes, a 46-year-old with a long, graying beard, nonchalantly mentions that his men cleared away some cluster bombs by themselves."



"Mr. Krause, whose 11-member team hasn't been able to start fighting fires yet in Iraq because it's been waiting for equipment, has been impressed with the Kuwaitis' early efforts. "They said, 'Shoot, we'll go ahead and start working,' " he marvels. The Kuwaitis are good firefighters, he says, but adds: "On real, real, real critical wells, they'll call us in." So far, the Kuwaitis haven't needed much help. With blasts from two water cannons, Mr. Bou Yabes and his 30-member team snuffed their first fire early this week in 15 minutes. The next day, the team capped the gushing oil well. Fierce sandstorms appeared temporarily to have damped three other raging fires in recent days, though the wells still need to be properly extinguished and capped. Meanwhile, American oil-field contractors spent much of the week trying to line up trucks, bulldozers and other heavy equipment, and secure a reliable water supply. Holed up in the Crown Plaza hotel in Kuwait City, they were also waiting for U.S. troops to secure the fields after hearing unconfirmed reports of a firefight between coalition soldiers and Iraqi troops. "I don't see any hostile forces," shrugged Mr. Bou Yabes, speaking from a cellphone a few hundred yards from the reported site of a battle the evening before."

"The Kuwaitis are now coordinating their work under an agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Unlike the Texan contractors, the Kuwaiti company isn't getting paid by the U.S. for its firefighting services. They say their help is a gesture of friendship to the Iraqi people, but Kuwait also wanted to prevent pollution risks and damage to the underground oil reservoirs, which it shares with Iraq. "They just showed up. It was a real surprise to me," says Ray Rodon, the project manager here for a Houston-based unit of Halliburton Co., which has been hired by the U.S. to supervise firefighting efforts"

Mr. Bou Yabes battled fires in Kuwait alongside the founders of Boots & Coots, Asger "Boots" Hansen and Edward "Coots" Matthews, both now retired. In 1991, Mr. Bou Yabes remembers Texans betting that his team couldn't put out one particularly nasty tower of flame and smoke in Kuwait's burning fields. They did. Friday, the Texans plan to begin battling the fires alongside the Kuwaitis. Both sides downplay any rivalry. Still, "there's some of that manliness, like we don't want the other guy to finish before us," Mr. Krause says, referring to Mr. Bou Yabes. "He'd be lying if he didn't tell you that, too"