I saw a small documentary about an American crew in Kuwait where someone said that putting out the fire was the easy part - capping was the hard part. So maybe

I saw a small documentary about an American crew in Kuwait where someone said that putting out the fire was the easy part - capping was the hard part. So maybe that's part of it. That being said, the documentary did dramatize a particularly difficult to put out well head but they did manage to put that one out as well by just putting a cap on it which allowed the fire to shoot out above at a higher level and then turning off the valve to choke out the fire. I got the impression that this was an outlier well and that most of the others were extinguished more easily.