"Hellfighter" Red Adair dies at 89

By The Associated Press and Reuters

Adair was a well-known oil-well firefighter.

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Mr. Adair, who boasted that none of his employees ever suffered a serious injury fighting hundreds of dangerous well fires around the world, died Saturday of natural causes at a Houston hospital, said his daughter, Robyn Adair.

Mr. Adair revolutionized the science of snuffing and controlling wells spewing high-pressure jets of oil and gas, using explosives, water cannons, bulldozers, drilling mud and concrete.

He is credited with battling more than 2,000 land and offshore oil-well fires, including 119 fires in Kuwaiti oil fields at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War; the infamous "Devil's Cigarette Lighter" in Algeria in 1962, whose 800-foot flames were seen from space by astronaut John Glenn; the 1979 blowout of Mexico's Ixtoc-1 well in the Bay of Campeche; and the 1988 Piper Alpha platform disaster in the North Sea that killed 167 men.

"It scares you: all the noise, the rattling, the shaking," Mr. Adair once said, describing a blowout. "But the look on everybody's face when you're finished and packing, it's the best smile in the world; and there's nobody hurt, and the well's under control."

His daring reputation for never having met a blowout he couldn't cap earned him the nickname "Hellfighter." That inspired the title of the 1968 John Wayne movie based on his life, "The Hellfighters."

Because of his death-defying exploits, the world tended to glorify Mr. Adair's work, but he never did.

"What it boils down to is dirty and hard work. It is nasty and dangerous," he said.

"We look at all these blow-outs as bad. The day you get to where you say one job is worse than another is the day you get careless — and that is something we can't afford," he said.

Mr. Adair began fighting oil-well fires by chance in 1938 when one day, working as an itinerant worker, he delivered equipment to an oil field near Alice, Texas. An oil well blew out while he was in the area and Myron Kinley, the leading oil-well firefighter of that era, needed help.

"He said, 'Boy, do you want to work and make some money?' " Mr. Adair recalled.
 
Mr. Adair, who had grown accustomed to fire when as a boy he worked alongside his blacksmith father, quickly accepted the job.

He bought McKinley's company for $125 in 1959 and founded Red Adair Co. Inc.

He proudly spent his 76th birthday in Kuwait clad in his trademark red coveralls, swinging valves into place atop out-of-control wells.

"Retire? I don't know what that word means," he told reporters at the time. "As long as a man is able to work and he's productive out there and he feels good — keep at it. I've got too many of my friends that retired and went home and got on a rocking chair, and about a year and a half later, I'm always going to the cemetery."

Mr. Adair, who finally did retire in 1994 and sold his company, was instrumental in expediting the shipment of crucial supplies and equipment to Kuwait by testifying before the Gulf Pollution Task Force and meeting with then-President George H.W. Bush about the logistics of the firefighting operation.

Mr. Adair's teams were among the first of 27 teams from 16 countries that spent eight months capping 732 Kuwaiti wells. His expertise helped greatly shorten an operation that had been expected to last three to five years, saving millions of barrels of oil and stopping an air-pollution disaster.

Finding workers was never easy for Mr. Adair because he needed men with his same rare combination of humility, level-headedness and courage.

"In this business, you don't want someone who thinks he can walk on water like some of them do," Mr. Adair said.

"If a guy's afraid, you sure as hell don't want him because if a man is afraid, he can't think. You have to react quickly out there and you can never let them coveralls run away."

Mr. Adair, who never showed fear in life, joked in 1991 that the hereafter would be no different.

"I've done made a deal with the devil," he said. "He said he's going to give me an air-conditioned place when I go down there, if I go there, so I won't put all the fires out."