Red Adair

Paul Neal (“Red”) Adair, firefighter, died on August 7th 2004, aged 89

AS HE flew into Kuwait in March 1991, Red Adair could see nothing. The sky was filled with black smoke to a height of 15,000 feet, and it was impossible to tell what was north, south, east or west. The smoke came from burning oilfields, sabotaged by Saddam Hussein as his troops retreated. Each day, 5m barrels, worth $150m, were going up in flames.

From the crater that was Kuwait City’s airport, Mr Adair surveyed the scene. The horizon was filled with one continuous fire. At the core of the wells the temperature was 3,000°F, or about the heat needed to melt steel. On the ground, 50 feet away, it was still close to 1,000°. The fires were often not shooting up straight from the wellhead, but spewing out in all directions. Mr Adair and his men donned their overalls, discarded their plastic hats in favour of aluminium, and set about doing their job. “Red”, by the way, was then 75.

In retrospect, Mr Adair – never wanting in confidence or cockiness where fires were concerned – thought Kuwait had been easy. “We put all the fires out with water, just went from one to the next.” In fact, he reversed the flow in the oil pipes, pumping the nearest sea (“the Adriatic” as he blithely supposed) into the oilfields and saturating the ground with water before capping the wells. His 76th birthday found him joyfully moving the giant valves into position with a crane. In the end, he put out in nine months a conflagration that was expected to burn uncontrollably for three to five years.

The hard part for Mr Adair was getting the equipment he wanted, and at once, out of the relevant governments. Only a personal chat with President Bush senior at the White House got him his bulldozers, piping and cement in a time he thought reasonable, cutting through the red tape. The Kuwaiti government played up over his demand for an aircraft full of whiskey (“Do they want their fires out, or not?”), and he never got the 4,000 pigs he had requested to detonate the mines which Saddam was supposed to have strewn across the oilfields.

If Kuwait was an easy sort of fire, by his standards, what was a tricky one? Perhaps the first with which he seized the world’s attention, in 1962. The “Devil’s Cigarette Lighter” had been burning for six months in the desert sands of Algeria, fuelled by a daily diet of 550m cubic feet of gas; the flames were seen by John Glenn from space as he orbited the Earth. Mr Adair used underground water to soak the area for miles around and then laid explosives, with which he blew out the fire. This technique, starving fires of oxygen and then instantly capping the well with mud and cement, remained his favourite.

More hazardous still were fires out on oil platforms, such as the Bravo blowout in the North Sea in 1977 and the Piper Alpha disaster, off Aberdeen, in 1988, where the capping of the well had to be done in the face of mountainous seas. For these jobs, Mr Adair used support-and-rescue ships and semi-submersible fire-boats all of his own design. At Piper Alpha, where 167 men had died, huge pieces of debris had to be moved from the wellhead by cranes tossing like flotsam amid the wind and the waves.

Mr Adair was proud of his equipment and, to prove it, made sure most of it was red. Red cranes, red overalls, red bulldozers

and red boots announced to the world that his team had been called to the scene. From the first days of the founding of his firefighting company, in 1959, his men tooled round the dry scrub of the Texas oilfields in red Lincolns, easy to spot when needed. Off the job, Mr Adair sported red long-johns and drove a red Bentley. Short and stocky he might be, but he was full to the brim with Texas swagger. He was never more thrilled than when John Wayne played him in “Hellfighters” and he, Red Adair, was called in to give the Duke technical advice.

He was born in Houston in 1915, one of eight children in a blacksmith’s family. Appropriately enough, he was called “Red” because of his flaming hair. Exposed early on to the roar of the forge and the flying sparks from the anvil, he had no fear of fire. When others fled, he would walk straight up to the blaze. He saw fires as individual creatures; none could be treatedlike another. All the same, “I haven’t met one yet you can’t lick in around six weeks.”

Yet only chance got him into his dangerous trade. After dropping out of school, he worked on the railroad, in a drug store and as an itinerant labourer. One day in 1938 he was taking equipment to an oilfield near Alice, Texas, when a well blew. The crew fled; the firefighters, though trained in oilfield work, could not control the blaze. “Boy, do you want to work and make some money?” he was asked.

In more than 50 years of firefighting, he dealt with almost 3,000 fires. Remarkably, he was never much hurt. A crane crushed him once, and he suffered a few days of smoke-blindness. Exploding gas threw him in the air, but he seemed to bounce. In his later years he was deaf, not surprisingly, for much of his life had been spent amid the roar of flames or explosions. He perfected the art of snoozing while conflagrations raged around him.

Although he anticipated Heaven, he rather hoped for a sighting of Hell.