- Special Sections - Public Notices Urtabulak and Ixtoc — two
obscure names that can be found in the dusty (and unread)
journals of historic blunders. Those who do not learn from
history are doomed to repeat it. Let’s go back 47 years and see
how little we’ve learned. In 1963, a natural gas well in
Urtabulak (southern Uzbekistan) burst into flames, shooting a
burning pillar 400 feet into the air. The Soviets had not
developed sufficient control mechanisms and so it burned for
three years with 12 million cubic meters of gas burning every
day (over three cubic miles of gas burned). After countless
attempts and strategies to quell the fire, the Soviets finally
found a solution in 1966 ... they nuked the well. As drastic as
that may sound, it worked. In 1979, an offshore oilrig (named
Ixtoc) in the Bay of Campeche in the Gulf of Mexico exploded and
leaked oil into the gulf for nine months, spilling a total of
150 million gallons of oil. The efforts to stop the leak were
identical to those used by BP over the past