Red Adair

A hundred years ago this month was born one of the most flamboyant characters ever to grace the highways and byways of the oil patch. On June 18, 1915, Paul Neal “Red” Adair first saw the light of day in Houston, Texas. The dim glow of public awareness that greeted him that day was destined to grow into an intense light almost as bright as the flames of the more than 2,000 oil well fires he extinguished during his lifetime.

His thick thatch of bright red hair early earned him the name “Red,” a title destined to follow him throughout his life. Adair grew up poor and quit school in his teenage years to help support the family. He labored at a variety of jobs ranging from semi-professional boxer to work on the Southern Pacific Railroad. Finally, in 1938, he got his first job in the oil patch with the Otis Pressure Control Company. Like so many with limited education and a will to work at jobs either “too dirty, too hard, or too dangerous for most,” he found a good-paying niche in the patch. That is where he was in 1945 when he was drafted into the U.S. Army.

It was that experience in the military, serving in the 139^th Bomb Disposal Squadron, that Red Adair mastered the art of handling explosives. Those techniques, combined with a firm grounding in safety measures, prepared him for the years to come. Upon discharge from the military in the spring of 1946, he hired out to Myron Kinley of the M.M. Kinley Company based in Oklahoma. The 14 years he spent there honing his skills in well blowout control and oil well firefighting provided a firm basis for the work that later made him famous. The Kinley Company was a pioneer in developing a variety of innovative practices and inventions in the area of oil well blowouts and the ensuing fires that earned it the reputation as being the best in the business. During his years there, Adair gained a reputation as one of the most innovative practitioners of that trade.

For those outside the petroleum industry, and even many within the trade, spectacular oil well fires are an intense focus of interest in which the real purpose of the firefighter is often lost. The real purpose is to cap the well and stop the blowout that caused the mess in the first place. Putting out the fire is only the first step in that process. In truth there are any number of well blowouts that do not catch fire and are capped before any fiery disruption occurs. Adair and his ilk have spent untold thousands of hours developing specialized blowout control equipment, as well as the unique techniques designed specifically to stop uncontrolled blowouts. With that said, the spectacular oil well fire remains the centerpiece of their work and a magnificent advertising tool.

In 1959 Red left Kinley and moved to Houston where he established the Red Adair Company. Well aware of the importance of attracting public attention, he adopted the practice of having all his employees wear red clothing topped off by bright red hard hats. His company vehicles were all red in color, and even his personal Cadillac was a fire engine red. It didn’t take long for his company to become known as the best in the business at “wild well” control techniques.

The first couple of years he was out on his own, Adair attracted considerable attention within the industry by putting out the spectacular CATCO offshore fire as well as a number of others, both land based and offshore. But the event that catapulted him into worldwide acclaim as a fire fighter came in 1962. The situation itself erupted in November of 1961 when a Phillips Petroleum gas well located in the Sahara Desert in Algeria experienced a blowout. It immediately caught fire, producing flames that soared an estimated 700 feet into the air. The conflagration was so enormous that the astronaut John Glenn even reported spotting it from space. The press wasted no time hanging the moniker of the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter on it.

Adair and his crew arrived on the scene in late November 1961 and began preparations for fighting the fire. Because of its location in the desert there was a critical lack of water necessary to complete the job. It took them six months to totally finish the operation which included excavating three football sized pits ten feet deep to contain the water needed to fight the blaze along with laying water lines to the location. While that was being done, the task of preventing re-ignition after the fire was out was accomplished by a fleet of specially rigged bulldozers that dragged all the glowing residue of the collapsed rig and other metallic materials out of the crater created by the fire. Finally, by placing a huge nitroglycerin charge at the wellhead, a massive explosion sucked all the oxygen away from the blaze in order to snuff it out. That successful explosion allowed the team to cap the well and return it to service on May 28, 1962.

Here’s how Wikipedia describes the event:

“The Devil’s Cigarette Lighter produced more than 6,000 cubic feet of natural gas per second. The blowout and fire were estimated to have consumed enough gas to supply Paris for three months, burning 550,000,000 cubic feet per day…. Adair worked the fire with Asger “Boots” Hansen and Ed “Coots” Matthews, who later formed the Boots & Coots well control company. Preparations took five months…. On April 28, 1962, Adair used a modified bulldozer with a 66-foot arm to move a metal drum containing a 550-pound dynamite charge to the well. Adair, Matthews, Hansen, and Charlie Tolar rode the rig, protected by a metal heat shield and water sprays, with Adair driving and the others on a shielded platform while medical teams and evacuation helicopters stood by. After positioning the explosives, the team ran to a trench about 150 feet from the well. The explosion extinguished the fire, and after two days to allow the well to cool, the well was capped.”

After that success and amidst all the publicity surrounding the event, Adair was asked about the justification for the massive expense involved in fighting the fire. Red was quoted as saying, “If you think it is expensive to hire a professional to do the job, just wait until you hire an amateur.” He went on to explain that, “Throughout the years, I’ve had the pleasure of assembling and training what I believe to be the best group of people in the world. People with the presence of mind to deal with any flare-up, including my own. People who share the belief that nothing is impossible.”

He was a stickler for safety and was immensely proud of the fact that in the process of extinguishing an average of forty-two fires every year over the length of time he was in business none of his employees were killed or seriously hurt. As he phrased it, “With bombs and fires you get only one mistake.” How he defined “seriously hurt,” though, might be a matter of debate given that in regard to his own situation he once stated that, “I got cut in two once and got blowed up a time or two, but nothing permanent.” I suppose he considered those types of incidents normal in his line of work.

After his fame skyrocketed with the success of putting out the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter, Hollywood came a’calling. The film “Hellfighters” starring no less than the legendary John Wayne playing a character based on Red’s experiences was released to considerable box office success in 1968. Adair served as technical advisor on the film whose culminating event was based on the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter job. With the release of that film, the name of Red Adair spread far beyond the oil patch where it became well known to a general public that hailed him as a true American hero.

In 1972 his growing reputation within the oil and gas industry prompted him to establish the Red Adair Service and Marine Company which provided specialized firefighting equipment to others in the industry. That equipment included specially designed and insulated bull dozers rigged with devices for removing debris and for placing explosives near burning well heads as well as a variety of high pressure water cannon spraying devices necessary for the fire extinguishing work. But due to his growing reputation for fighting offshore blazes, he also designed several ships specifically built for that purpose. His most famous invention in that regard was creating a semi-submersible vessel that is still used today and has become a critical element in offshore work.

In 1988 his company once again received massive press coverage for its work on the disastrous Piper Alpha production platform explosion in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland. The structure was producing oil and gas from 24 wells when a gas leak caused it to explode, killing 167 men and leaving the destroyed facility a blazing inferno. In addition to the fires and wreckage seas were running sixty-five to seventy feet in height and winds were gusting up to seventy-five miles per hour. It has been ranked as the world’s worst offshore oil well disaster in history.

Utilizing a firefighting vessel of his design named the Tharos, it took the Adair team only three weeks to extinguish the fires and cap the wells. The greatest problem with the Alpha Piper job was not the technical aspects of putting out the fires and capping the wells, but the difficulties of dealing with bad weather at sea. The physical abilities of the then 73 year old Adair also cramped his hands-on style of leadership when the bad weather prevented his transferring from the Alpha to the actual work site, but he was immensely proud of the fact that his team completed the seemingly impossible job in such a short time.

Only three years after the Alpha Piper disaster another of greater magnitude developed when in the course of the Desert Storm war in the Middle East Saddam Hussein set fire to more than 700 oil wells in the Kuwait oilfield. Once again the Red Adair team was one of the first contacted. This time the situation was somewhat different from the norm if there is any such thing as a norm in the oil well firefighting world.

The massive undertaking began having considerable delays in getting off the ground when Adair reportedly called President George H.W. Bush and explained the difficulties. That cleared a number of hurdles, and within two weeks equipment began pouring into the area. In keeping with Red’s observations about expense of fighting fires more than one hundred D8 Caterpillar tractors normally costing in the $280,000 range were especially fitted at a cost averaging $600,000 each and transported to the scene. They represented only a fraction of the cost of the job.