Presumably, I'm older than you. I was actually watching this on the news at the time it was happening.

At that time, it was not framed as "if nothing is done and we stand idly by and watch it burn." It was framed as "We simply don't have the manpower to resolve this and it's likely that many of these hundreds of oil well fires will end up simply burning themselves out while we try to get to them because the scale of this is just beyond what we have capacity to try to fix."

Then crack teams from around the world converged on Kuwait and developed new techniques on the spot that were more efficient and effective.