Firefighter who turned the wrench on 2,000 wellheads OBITUARY PAUL N. 'RED' ADAIR:

Monday, Aug 09, 2004

Paul Neal ("Red") Adair, who forged a legend capping runaway oil gushers and battling their raging fires, died on Saturday in a Houston hospital. He was 89.

For Mr Adair, it all began one chilly December morning in 1940. The burly young redhead, who had found work doing odd jobs for Otis Pressure Control, a company that serviced drilling rigs, was helping out on a gas well near Smackover, Arkansas, when the wellhead blew. A high-pressure geyser of gas shot into the air, scattering debris and threatening to explode into flame.

Everyone ran, except Mr Adair. He grabbed a wrench, walked calmly to the wellhead and tightened the bolts on a containment flange that had worked loose and caused the leak. The blowout was capped. A career was born.

Over the next 40 years, Mr Adair made that terrifying walk to blown or burning wellheads nearly 2,000 times.

He said he would often begin the walk in the company of as many as 10 men. "Pretty soon, though, I'd look around and there'd only be five left," he said in his biography, An American Hero, by Philip Singerman.

"I'd go on a little farther, and look around again, and maybe there'd be one left," Mr Adair said. "A lot of times, there'd be none, just me."

Mr Adair criss-crossed the world from Sumatra to the Sahara Desert, risking his life again and again choking off natural gas blowouts and snuffing out searing blazes on runaway wells. He suffered countless bruises, burns and smoke inhalations and, once, a crushed pelvis.

In 1962, he put out a Libyan oil well fire that had burned so brightly astronaut John Glenn saw it from space. In 1970, he snuffed out an oil well platform fire off Louisiana that sparked laws making those responsible pay for the mess. In 1980, he capped a well off the Yucatan coast that had poured 100m gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

When, in 1969, Hollywoodmade a movie based on his exploits, only one actor could play the lead - John Wayne. Mr Adair was a technical adviser on The Hellfighters and the actor and the firefighter took a natural liking to each other.

Oil well drilling surged during the postwar economic boom and, for the first time, Mr Adair was making good money. He bought Cadillacs for himself and his wife - painted fire-engine red - and they moved into ever bigger and more sumptuous homes.

In 1959, he started his own business, Red Adair Co. Inc. The business, which started slowly, picked up steam rapidly during the oil boom of the 1960s.

The big oil companies paid him well for his work but when a small-time wildcatter had a problem, Mr Adair sometimes handled the job for nothing. None the less, Forbes magazine estimated that during his career, Adair netted more than Dollars 100m.

Age and economics were starting to catch up with him. The oil booms were history, and in 1986, Mr Adair suffered a heart attack. He soldiered on, but things were not quite the same.

In 1988, his company quenched oil well fires that had killed 167 people on a platform in the North Sea. Mr Adair was 73 by then, and younger men were called upon to brave the flames at the wellheads.

At the end of the Gulf war, his company extinguished Kuwaiti oil well fires set by Saddam Hussein's men. This time, the work was shared with a number of other companies.

In 1994, Mr Adair finally called it quits, holding a news conference to announce the sale of his company. A reporter had the temerity to ask him if, at 78, he finally was too old to fight fires. "Oh, hell no," Red Adair replied.

Eric Malnic

Eric Malnic is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. This article appears here by special arrangement with that paper.

By ERIC MALNIC