WASHINGTON - The US army said it gave the main Iraqi oil well firefighting contract to a unit of Halliburton Co., a firm once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, without any bidding.
Kellogg, Brown and Root, a unit of Houston, Texas-based Halliburton, was handed the contract by the Army Corps of Engineers, which has been placed in charge of fighting the blazes.
The contract had not been put out to tender, said the Corps spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Gene Pawlik.
Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) had already been asked by the Pentagon to draw up plans for extinguishing oil well fires in Iraq, Pawlik noted.
"It made the most sense to engage them in the near term as the company to get the mission done because they were familiar with the details of the fires themselves and what would be needed," he said.
The value of the contract would depend on the scale of the work.
The chief of Britain's armed forces, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, said Friday that Iraqi forces had set fire to seven oil wells in the south of the country.
KBR would claim the cost of its services plus two to five percent depending on how it executed the job, Pawlik said.
Shares in KBR parent Halliburton rose 54 cents or 2.68 percent to 20.66 dollars.
"KBR was selected for this award based on the fact that KBR is the only contractor that could commence implementing the complex contingency plan on extremely short notice," the company said in a statement.
KBR said it had teams of well control and engineering contractors preparing the initial phase.
The company was given a free hand to choose subcontractors for the work, the Corps spokesman said.
KBR chose Houston-based Boots and Coots International, with which it has a services and equipment partnership, and Wild Well Control Inc. as firefighting subcontractors.
President George W. Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said he did not have the details.
"I think the question that people will want answered is: Do we have a plan in place to put out the oil fires, and is it a good plan to put out the oil fires?," he told a news conference.
Bush asked lawmakers on Tuesday to approve some 3.5 billion dollars in aid to get Iraq back on its feet, including nearly half a billion for oil field repair.
In a statement late Monday, the Defense Department said the Army Corps of Engineers would rely largely on contractors to extinguish the oil well fires and assess the damage to facilities.
Halliburton Handed No-Bid Iraqi Oil Firefighting Contract
Posted by Circulars Admin at March 26, 2003 10:06 AMTo address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Posted by: Emmett on January 19, 2004 01:22 AMNote the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.
Posted by: Grace on January 19, 2004 01:22 AMBut variables get one benefit people do not
Posted by: Paul on January 19, 2004 01:23 AMInside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.
Posted by: Joan on January 19, 2004 01:24 AMLet's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:
Posted by: Anne on January 19, 2004 01:25 AM