Wednesday, April 23, 2003

Boots and Coots

Major Barbara catches Slate and the New York Times in a bit of an, um, error.

Canadian Safety Boss, Inc.'s president and CEO Mike Miller doesn't mince words about the hellfighting business.

He doesn't have to.

Safety Boss put out more oil well fires than any other company in Kuwait in 1991 -- more than Red Adair, more than Boots & Coots, more than any American company. They're
Canadian, and they're proud to have secured more oil wells in the wake of Operation Desert Storm than anyone else.

"We were the top team," Mr. Miller typed in an e-mail to this writer. True to his word, he backed that statement up with the facts.

But they're not the facts -- make that the alleged facts -- that the New York Times reported on March 30 -- and they certainly don't jibe with what was tossed around in Christopher Hitchens' recent piece for Slate.

The New York Times said that "Boots & Coots International Well Control... put out about a third of the fires set in Kuwait in 1991 and earned perhaps as much as $100 million in the process."

That's simply not accurate -- and Mike Miller knows it.

As proof, here are some statistics from the 1994 book Advanced Blowout and Well Control, from industry-leader Gulf Publishing (from Table 3, p. 390). (The stats might have helped the
Times' fact-checker, too.) Here's how many wells were "secured" by the top teams, out of author Bob Grace's total of 727:

Safety Boss - 176
Boots & Coots - 126
Wild Well Control - 120
Red Adair - 111
Kuwait Oil Company - 41
Cudd Pressure Control - 23

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