Red Adair
| Red Adair | |
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Red Adair in 1964
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| Born |
Paul Neal Adair June 18, 1915 Houston, Texas |
| Died | August 7, 2004 (aged 89) Houston, Texas |
| Occupation | Firefighter |
Paul Neal "Red" Adair (June 18, 1915 – August 7, 2004) was an American oil well firefighter. He became notable as an innovator in the highly specialized and hazardous profession of extinguishing and capping oil well blowouts, both land-based and offshore.
Adair was born in Houston, Texas, the son of an Irish blacksmith, and attended Reagan High School. He began fighting oil well fires after returning from serving in an Army bomb disposal unit during World War II. He started his career working for Myron Kinley, the "original" blowout/oil firefighting pioneer. They pioneered the technique of using a V-shaped charge of high explosives (the Munroe effect being used during the war and used in bazookas and the atom bomb), the high velocity blast of which would snuff the fire. He founded Red Adair Co. Inc. in 1959, and over the course of his career battled more than 2,000 land and offshore oil well, natural gas well, and similar spectacular fires. Adair gained global attention in 1962 when he tackled a fire at the Gassi Touil gas field in the Algerian Sahara nicknamed the Devil's Cigarette Lighter, a 450 foot (140 m) pillar of flame that burned from 12:00 PM November 13, 1961 to 9:30 AM on April 28, 1962. In December 1968, Adair sealed a large gas leak at an Australian gas and oil platform off Victoria's southeast coast.
In 1977, he and his crew (including Asger "Boots" Hansen and Manohar "Man" Dhumtara-Kejriwal) contributed to the capping of the biggest oil well blowout 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). In 1978, Adair's top lieutenants Hansen and Ed "Coots" Matthews left to found competitor Boots & Coots International Well Control Inc. In 1988, Adair was again in the North Sea where he helped to put out the UK sector Piper Alpha oil platform 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.
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