O.C. Cameraman Found ‘Hell on Earth’ in Kuwait

DANA POINT — Filming the flaming oil fields in Kuwait last year--the worst oil field disaster in history--James Deckard brought his camera as close as 20 feet to violent flames that shot skyward like high-speed geysers, as hot as 4,000 degrees.

He developed a hacking, lingering cough, irritated his eyes and severely burned his fingers. For a time, he had to bathe with diesel fuel.

Still, “I was kind of sad when it was over with, to tell you the truth,” recalls the 54-year-old, Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, who lives in Dana Point. “You feel like, gosh, that was probably the most important thing in my life, and it’s all done now.

“I was driving from the fires back to my hotel. We were leaving the next morning. I stopped on the highway and just watched the fires because, I thought, I’m never going to see anything like this again.”

Television audiences will have a chance to see much of what Deckard saw when the Arts & Entertainment channel airs his hourlong documentary “Hell on Earth: Kuwaiti Oil Fires,” Friday at 6 and again at 10 p.m. on its “Investigative Reports” program.

The fires that Deckard spent six weeks filming had been set by retreating Iraqi troops at the close of the Persian Gulf War. Deckard also filmed firefighters’ successful attempts to extinguish the blazes, a seven-month, multinational effort that ended in November. Dubbed Operation Desert Hell, it cost about $1.5 billion and involved about 550 firefighters plus 10,000 support personnel.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s forces had ignited about 730 wells. Deckard’s footage captures the unbridled force of the oil and gas fires spewing plumes of smoke that blackened the noonday sun, gushing ferocious and white-hot from well tops, reaching as high as 300 feet straight up, turning the ground into a carpet of red and orange flames and vast, deep lakes of black crude.

Other documentaries have been made about the fires. But, Deckard said, no daily news crews followed the firefighters step by step. Nor did they get the close-up footage he shot--at some personal cost.

Exposed skin blistered at 25 feet. Deckard said he couldn’t operate his camera without cutting finger holes in his gloves. Ergo, his burned fingers. Likewise, he couldn’t see through his camera with goggles, so his eyes were badly irritated. “Also,” he continued, “I inhaled a lot of smoke and was spitting up a lot of nasty stuff when I first came back.”

Plus, there were explosives, used often and liberally, and nauseous gas fumes, constant overheating that made his heart race. Not to mention the damage to his portable video cameras, several of which were destroyed by the heat.

But worst of all, Deckard said, was the filth.

“When I first got over there, I’d go back to where we were staying in Kuwait city, and there was no running water, so I’d just wash off what I could with some diesel fuel (to remove tar) or bottled water and just try to get comfortable enough to sleep until 4:30 the next morning,” when the daily wake up call would come.

So why did he do it? It was a story he couldn’t pass up. Deckard had been a television cameraman, director and cinematographer for more than 30 years. Earthtrust International, the Hawaii-based, nonprofit environmental organization that funded the film and co-produced it with Deckard, had flown him to Kuwait to record its various war-related conservation activities, which he did. But acres of raging flames and firefighters’ dramatic battles drew his attention and camera lens away, even from such concerns as self-preservation.

“It really was god-awful when we first got there,” Deckard said. “The whole landscape was on fire, and it was obviously the biggest story there beside the war damage, so I just kind of took it on my own to do a documentary. It was the chance of a lifetime.”

Earthtrust backed Deckard’s decision, according to Robert Loy, the group’s executive director. “It is an incredible story of guys who risk their lives in incredible circumstances,” Loy said.

Deckard is no stranger to high-risk assignments. In 1963, covering civil rights activities in the South for an NBC affiliate, he was mobbed and beaten during the riots that broke out at the University of Mississippi when James Meredith became the school’s first black student.

In 1968, while working as a cameraman in Vietnam for United Press International, he was wounded twice, once with shrapnel during the siege of Khe Sanh and once when shot down from a helicopter near the Mekong Delta. And in the winter of 1980, he faced subzero temperatures and polar bears in northern Manitoba while filming “Polar Bear Alert,” a National Geographic special which garnered him a News and Documentary Emmy Award for cinematography in 1983.

His most recent project was an Earthtrust documentary on rhinoceros poaching in South Africa and Kenya, expected to air this summer.

At the spacious, Spanish-style home in Dana Point where he lives with his wife, Lucia, and their 17-year-old daughter, Quin, Deckard remembered that during his time in Kuwait (four weeks in May and two more in October), he was most impressed by the firefighters’ heroism.

“First, you have to control the fire, so it’s going in one direction, straight up. Then you can put the fire out. But that’s not the most dangerous part,” he said. “Once the fire’s out, the firefighters work close to the well. They’re right in there with the oil, and if it was reignited, it would kill you instantly, because there’s no way to get away.

“Most of the (firefighters) themselves are high school graduates, guys who’d just be out of a job back in Amarillo right now, and they’re just doing a job they wanted for the money (which ranged from $1,000 to $2,000 a day). But they risk their lives and they also understood how important (their job) was.

“They don’t talk about it though. They won’t brag, and if you ask them something like ‘Gee, what was that like?’ they’ll say, ‘Ah, it wasn’t nothin’.’ They (give) really bad interviews, but I think they’re heroes.”

One show of bravery that stands out in Deckard’s mind involved a “stove pipe,” a 30- to 40-foot-tall metal cylinder placed with a crane over a well to suction flames far above firefighters’ heads so that they may work to extinguish the fire at the well’s mouth.

“One of the firefighters was a small guy, and the stove pipe was quite low, and he turned sideways and it sucked his leg up in it. And his friend grabbed his arm, but then his other leg went up in it. If it sucked (his whole body) up in it, it would have obviously killed him.

“The (others) weren’t strong enough to pull him out for well over a minute and at one point he was screaming ‘Let me go!’ because it hurt so bad. He was ready to die. But they wouldn’t let go, and they finally got him pulled out. It had just ripped his pants off.”

Deckard also filmed attempts to extinguish one of the worst fires, Ahmadi 25 (nicknamed the “three-headed monster” because flames shot out from the well in three directions). Putting out the fire involved enough explosives to “blow up Dana Point,” Deckard said. To shoot the explosion, he rode a bulldozer sporting a 40-foot-long boom, then jumped off at the last minute.

“It’s a pretty good shot,” he said modestly, “although it was pretty shaky. . . . I wasn’t able to stay with them until they put that fire out, because it took them weeks to extinguish it.”

Still, Deckard said his key to success with “Hell on Earth” was tenacity, staying with it day after day. “You get tired and sick, and it’s easy to go home. You (could) just say ‘I’m going to the hotel (to) find a swimming pool.’ But you can’t do that, because if you do that, sure enough, that’s the day they’re going to be doing something you need to get.”

Television news coverage of the Gulf War was wildly popular and Deckard admits that sure-bet audience appeal was part of his motivation.

“Yeah, sure. Fame and fortune. Sure.”

But there was another element at play, he added, repeating advice he once got from veteran Life magazine photojournalist David Douglas Duncan.

“One time he told me, ‘If you want to make a living taking pictures, you’ve got to go places where people don’t go, to show them things they can’t see by themselves,’ ” Deckard said. “And that’s really what documentary filmmakers have to do.”

* “Hell on Earth: Kuwaiti Oil Fires,” an hourlong documentary by James Deckard, will be shown Friday at 6 p.m. and again at 10 p.m. on A&E; cable network.