Dealing with disaster
| Photo courtesy Paul Kostecki |
Try to imagine 600 million barrels of crude oil — the amount spilled in Kuwait as the Iraqi army retreated in the last days of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Paul Kostecki, research associate professor and associate director of the Northeast Regional Environmental Public Health Center, School of Public Health and Health Sciences, traveled there in 1994. A man whose job involves human and ecological risk assessment and management, he was nevertheless stunned by the destruction he saw. It was a nightmare landscape: lakes of oil, the damage caused by mists of oil that fell as the fires from 750 oil wells were put out; tens of thousands of dead migratory birds that landed on the oil lakes thinking they were water. Kostecki has been back to the war-damaged country to teach workshops in his field, and this has led to the building of a partnership between UMass and the government of Kuwait. The two will hold a joint conference in August 2001 in London, the International Congress on Petroleum Contaminated Soils, Sediments and Water. It is a version of a similar conference that has been held at UMass for the past fifteen years.
