A pillar of black smoke blocked a quarter of the sky, turning the spring sky outside Kirkuk overcast and hinting at yet another attack on the all-important pipeline to the refinery at Baiji.
But no one at the Strategic Infrastructure Brigade, whose job it is to protect the buried length of pipeline and whose local headquarters is no more than a kilometre (half a mile) away, had any idea what was going on.
Major Abdullah Hussein Saad, the SIB second battalion's executive officer, said that there had been reports of a leak the night before. Then, without any sound of an explosion, it had all caught fire this morning.
"No one saw anything," he told US soldiers visiting his base and inquiring about the massive fire. "It's hard to see anything; there's a lot of grass and people are constantly coming and going."
That did not impress Captain Ryan Peay, whose battalion of the 101st Airborne Division's 327th Artillery regiment is responsible for co-ordinating with the SIB.
"It was daylight, there was a leak and you had no one watching it," he asked with no small degree of incredulity.
As it turned out, the Northern Oil Company (NOC) had sealed the leak the night before and then burned off the massive pool of oil that had collected in the area - without telling anyone.
No sabotage, but no one knew it.
Somewhere underneath Kirkuk are an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil, with a strong chance there might be more. Yet disintegrating infrastructure and a relentless campaign of sabotage has restricted the flow of the area's greatest resource to a trickle.
These days, the NOC pumps about 320,000 barrels per day from its dilapidated plant just north of the city, and only for domestic consumption. That is less than half the total before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and a quarter of the 1991 figure.
Oil makes up 90 percent of Iraq's government revenues, but the pipeline to the Turkish port of Ceyhan is idle and none of Kirkuk's oil is leaving the country thanks to repeated attacks.
The SIB's job is critical to Iraq's reconstruction and development.
The oil ministry said in early March that attacks on oil sites, mostly in the north, have cost the country's coffers 6.25 billion dollars in 2005 alone and prevented the export of 400,000 barrels per day from its northern fields.
The brigade whose job it is to protect the oil fields and pipelines suffers from a lack of equipment and the questionable loyalty of some of its members.
At one time, the pipelines snaking throughout the countryside were protected by tribal levies, but now Brigadier General Safin Haidar Mahmud has the tough job of organising a tribal brigade attached to the regular army.
"The challenge the SIB has that other Iraqi army units don't have is their tribal roots, since these soldiers are all from the local tribal areas," said Captain Cochran Pruett, a comrade of Captain Peay. Their unit is charged with co-ordinating and training the various protection units in the area.
Some battalions are farther along than others and there is also the problem of questionable loyalty.
General Mahmud says 100 soldiers from one of the new battalions have to be either reassigned or dismissed because "some don't seem loyal to their job." Some of the officers in battalion headquarters also had to be removed.
Pruett told Mahmud: "We think you should be very hard on those outposts that are close to where IEDs explode," referring to the home-made bombs bedevilling US convoys.
Kirkuk's oil infrastructure suffered a grievous blow in February when insurgents put three carefully placed explosives in the more modern of the area's two processing plants and put it out of action for at least a year.
The attack halved area production capacity and did 50 million dollars of damage.
In the past year, the US military says there has been an average of one attack every 12 days, including 26 successful ones.
Pruett says that since his unit arrived in February, there have been no successful attacks.
Every 500 meters (yards) is a simple army tent, home to half a dozen SIB members guarding the pipeline.
The plan is eventually to fortify these positions with towers and barriers, but for now the guards are quite vulnerable, and under-equipped.
The force, which has only been part of the regular army since October 2005, doesn't have the trucks, equipment or weaponry it needs, and getting Baghdad to do something is difficult.
"The Ministry of Defence's response hasn't been very good and sometimes they are late," said General Mahmud. "The security and political situation in Baghdad is unsettled, and the new government has not been formed, so the ministry isn't very responsive."
So it is up to US forces to help train the SIB, provide fuel for its few vehicles and fortify its outposts.
A lot of work remains to be done at the ramshackle headquarters of the SIB's second battalion, especially after the battalion commander was purged after he was discovered to be the head of the local insurgency.
While US army medics teach his men a combat first aid class, another officer, Major Saad, said motivating the men is difficult. A number of them haven't received their salaries in six months.
"The basic problem is we still haven't been paid," he said, adding that they weren't popular in the area either.
"People resent us. We are supposed to protect the pipeline, but the people around here have no fuel," he said, before asking Captain Peay for more gasoline for his own vehicles.
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