Red Adair - Fire at the Wellhead

Fire-fighting specialist, born in Houston, Texas, USA. He worked as a pharmacy messenger and railroad labourer before joining the oil industry, where his courage and skill at dealing with fires came to the attention of Myron Kinley, with whom he formed a business in 1941. They developed the technique of using directional explosives, enabling charges to be delivered with great accuracy. He was called in as a troubleshooter to deal with major oil-well fires, tackling over 2000 during his life. In 1984 he and his team put out a major fire on an offshore rig near Rio de Janeiro, and in 1988 they were the first men to board the Piper Alpha oil rig in the North Sea after it was destroyed by an explosion. He was also one of the first called to extinguish the 700 oil fires started in Kuwait by Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf conflict (Operation Desert Storm, 1991). In 1968 he was the subject of a film, Hellfighters, starring John Wayne. He retired from fire-fighting in 1994.

Paul Neal "Red" Adair (June 18, 1915 – August 7, 2004) was a renowned American oil field firefighter. He became world famous as an innovator in the highly specialized and extremely hazardous profession of extinguishing and capping blazing, erupting oil wells, both land-based and offshore.

Adair was born in Houston, Texas, and attended Reagan High School. Adair began fighting oil well fires after returning from serving in a bomb disposal unit during World War II. He founded Red Adair Co., Inc., in 1959, and over his long career battled more than 2,000 land and offshore oil well, natural gas well, and similar spectacular fires. Red Adair gained global fame in 1962, when he tackled a fire at a gas field in the Sahara, a 450-foot (137m) pillar of flame, nicknamed the Devil's Cigarette Lighter. In 1988, he helped put out the Piper Alpha oil rig fire. At age 75, Adair took part in extinguishing the oil well fires in Kuwait set by retreating Iraqi troops after the Gulf War in 1991. In 1978, Adair's top lieutenants Asger "Boots" Hansen and Ed "Coots" Matthews left to found competitor Boots & Coots International Well Control, Inc. Coots bought its predecessor company in 1997, three years after Red Adair's retirement.

Red Adair retired in 1993, and sold his company The Red Adair Service and Marine Company to Global Industries. His top employees (Brian Krause, Raymond Henry, Rich Hatteberg) left and formed their own company, International Well Control (IWC).

The 1968 John Wayne movie Hellfighters was based upon the feats of Adair during the 1962 Sahara desert fire.

Fire at the Wellhead

Fire requires fuel, heat, and oxygen to burn (the fire triangle principle): In fighting a fire at a wellhead (the portion of the well at and just above the ground's surface), typically high explosives such as dynamite are used to consume all the local atmospheric oxygen and snuff the flame first. Doing so removes the oxygen, but the fuel (the natural gas or oil) is still present, often a huge "fountain" of oil surrounds the work area, showering fuel upon the working crew.

Due to recent advances in technology as well as environmental concerns, many wells today are capped while they burn. The use of high-powered water sprays and Purple K dry chemical (a potassium bicarbonate mixture) are used to extinguish the wells. and there's nobody hurt, and the well's under control." (to reporters while working at the Kuwaiti oil well fires at the end of the Gulf War in 1991) "I've done made a deal with the devil.