Fighting Oil Fires, and Creditors À¯Á¤ ÈÀç Áø¾Ð°ú ä±Ç´Ü
The war in Iraq might just determine the fate of a little-known Houston company, Boots & Coots International Well Control, which put out about a third of the oil-well fires set in Kuwait in 1991 and earned perhaps as much as $100 million in the process.
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ÁÖ¿ä¾îÈÖ * creditor : ä±ÇÀÚ.
Barring some drastic shift in the pattern of the war so far, the company could well go under. Áö±Ý±îÁö ÀüÀïÀÇ ¾ç»ó¿¡ ÀÖ¾î¼ ±ØÀûÀÎ ÀüȯÀÌ ¾ø¾ú´Ù¸é ÀÌ È¸»ç´Â ´ç¿¬È÷ ÆÄ»êÇßÀ» °ÍÀÌ´Ù.
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As recently as mid-February, the company acknowledged that creditors were pressuring it to file for bankruptcy, but its fortunes seemed to take a positive swing on March 6, when the Pentagon announced that it had a plan for fighting oil-well fires. Its plan was drafted by a unit of Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer, which has an agreement to subcontract oil-well firefighting to Boots & Coots.
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But its fortunes looked bleak again when, contrary to many expectations, the first days of the war produced only a relative handful of fires, compared with more than 700 in 1991. Danny Clayton, the operations manager of Boots & Coots, said on Monday that he was surprised that relatively few oil-well fires had started in Iraq so far.
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ÁÖ¿ä¾îÈÖ * bleak : óÀýÇÑ, ¾îµÎ¿î.
"It's as easy to destroy 90 wells as it is to destroy 9," said Mr. Clayton, who ran the company's oil-well firefighting operations in Kuwait after the 1991 war. "But there's still a good chance. They have several more oil fields, and I'm sure that they are not all secured yet."
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