Hellfighters

Some week ago, I was intrigued by the title of a movie "Hellfighters", in which John Wayne portrayed Paul “Red” Adair.

Maybe you are wondering who this man is. Just to mention some of his feats I can remember the Piper Alpha and the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter.

Adair began fighting oil well fires after returning from serving in a bomb disposal unit during World War II. He started his career working for Myron Kinley, the "original" blowout/oil firefighting pioneer. In the 1959 he founded Red Adair Co. Inc. and over the course of his career battled more than 2000 onshore and offshore oil wells, natural gas wells and similar spectacular fires.

His usual method was to blow out a fire by detonating explosives nearby. This meant that surrounding materials needed to have cooled sufficiently for the escaping oil and gas not to reignite; thus, the wellhead had to be cooled with large amounts of water first.

Devil's Cigarette Lighter

Adair gained his international reputation in 1962, when he tackled a fire at the Gassi Touil gas field in the Algerian Sahara nicknamed the Devil's Cigarette Lighter.

Ignited when a pipe ruptured on November 6, 1961, the Phillips Petroleum Company-owned well produced more than 6,000 cubic feet (170 m3) of natural gas per second, whose flame rose between 140 m and 240 m.
To get a picture of how big the blaze was astronaut John Glenn said he could see the fire raging when he was circling the Earth in an aircraft in space.

The blowout and fire were estimated to have consumed enough gas to supply Paris for three months. After burning almost six months, the fire was extinguished by Adair, who used 500 tons of explosives to deprive the flame of oxygen and capped the well.

Ekofisk Bravo platform

In 1977, he and his crew contributed to the capping of the biggest oil well blowout ever to have occurred in the North Sea (and at the time the largest offshore blowout worldwide, in terms of volume of crude oil spilled), at the Ekofisk Bravo platform, located in the Norwegian sector and operated by Phillips Petroleum Company (now ConocoPhillips).

PIPER ALPHA

In 1988, Adair was again in the North Sea where he helped to put out the UK sector Piper Alpha oil platform fire.  
The platform's legs were anchored 400ft beneath the North Sea, and more than 30 pipes were sucking up 30,000 barrels of crude oil as fire continued to engulf the platform.

Adair directed operations from aboard Tharos, the rescue and support ship which he had himself designed, and which pumped water on to the platform.

Piper Alpha was not the worst oil rig fire Red Adair had to deal with, but it was a job he hated because for the first time in his life he was not in there with his men fighting the blaze.
He brought the fires under control in three weeks, first pumping cement into the wells and then capping them.

Adair later recalled:
"We found that we were fighting the fires and the elements of the North Sea. We had this weird weather, 80-mile-an-hour winds, 70ft seas which they hadn't seen in 50 years."


KUWAIT

In the final day of the Gulf War 1991, at age 75, Adair took part in extinguishing the oil well fires in Kuwait set by retreating Iraqi troops.

Although it was thought that controlling these fires, fuelled by the country’s rich oil reserves, would take years to accomplish, Adair’s team capped 117 wells and aided others teams in completing the job in eight months.

Adair died in 2004, aged 89 and I like to remember him with the following quote: