August 9, 2004

Red Adair, Famed for Taming Oil Well Fires, Dies at 89

Red Adair, the oil field firefighter who was instrumental in capping Kuwaiti oil wells set ablaze by Iraq and whose life was the subject of a movie starring John Wayne, died Saturday in a Houston hospital. He was 89.

The death was a result of natural causes, his daughter, Robyn Adair, told The Associated Press.

Mr. Adair, who boasted that none of his employees ever suffered a serious injury fighting hundreds of dangerous well fires around the world, revolutionized the science of snuffing and controlling wells spewing high-pressure jets of oil and gas by using explosives, water cannons and bulldozers, and drilling mud and concrete.

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

Mr. Adair, whose real name was Paul, founded the Red Adair Company in 1959 and is credited with battling more than 2,000 land and offshore oil well fires, including the hundreds of wells set afire when the Iraqi army retreated from Kuwait during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

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

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

His crews 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 intercontinental air pollution disaster.

His feats included battling the July 1988 explosion of the Piper Alpha platform that killed 167 men in the stormy North Sea, 120 miles off the coast of Scotland.

Mr. Adair, the son of a blacksmith, was born in Houston and dropped out of high school to help support his family, according to a biography posted on the Web site of Adair Enterprises, a consulting firm he founded. He took his first oil-industry job in 1938 with the Otis Pressure Control Company. He had a brief stint with the Army during World War II before returning to work fighting oil well fires.

Mr. Adair joked in 1991 that he had ''made a deal with the devil.''

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.''

Photo: Red Adair fighting a storage-tank fire in Baytown, Tex., in 1965. (Photo by United Press International)