BS: John Wayne Movie Hellfighters

Subject: BS: John Wayne Movie Hellfighters
From: olddude
Date: 02 Apr 09 - 07:00 PM

boy I have not seen this one in years either, AMC is running it right now. Remember John Wayne putting out oil fires with Tim Hutton and Katherine Ross. boy he would have made a fortune during the first gulf war EH

Love this movie

Subject: RE: BS: John Wayne Movie Hellfighters
From: bobad
Date: 02 Apr 09 - 07:19 PM

Does he call everyone "Pilgrim" in this one too?

Subject: RE: BS: John Wayne Movie Hellfighters
From: Sorcha
Date: 02 Apr 09 - 07:31 PM

Er, no. Based on a pr of real 'hell fighters', Boots and Coots from Huston Texas. VERY good film, quite realistic. I've SEEN rig fires and they ain't pretty.

Subject: RE: BS: John Wayne Movie Hellfighters
From: pdq
Date: 02 Apr 09 - 07:35 PM

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)

Subject: RE: BS: John Wayne Movie Hellfighters
From: Sorcha
Date: 02 Apr 09 - 08:41 PM

Yes...sorry. pdq is CORRECT, it was Red Adair, NOT Boots and Coots. MY mistake.

Boots and Coots were Adair knock offs...and NOT as good

Subject: RE: BS: John Wayne Movie Hellfighters
From: GUEST,Slag
Date: 02 Apr 09 - 10:05 PM

I worked for about 8 months in the oil fields around Bakersfield CA with Dowell, a lesser rival of Haliburton and Schlumberger (-ber.jay). One of the rigs we were working on was about a mile from another in the Elk Hills Reserve which began spewing hydrogen sulfide gas. One man died and two others almost died. Then it caught fire.

Adair sent his "B" team in and they couldn't handle it so Adair himself was to come out and take a look at it. He was really a big celebrity to those in the industry and the talk was about. The local media followed him about for a little. Some time at night he visited the well site and said let it burn. It will stop in a couple of days and that was that. Three days later it backed off significantly and they were able to smother it by conventional means.

My father, a welder, used to run well casing on water wells which were often night jobs. I was very young and he took me on a job one night. He wanted to show me a gas well that had been burning for over twenty years (before the days of Mr. Adair). While miles from it you could see the glow. It looked like an acetylene torch without the oxygen turned very high and the flame roared over a hundred feet into the night sky. Dad said the pilots that flew up and down the San Joaquin Valley would used it as a beacon, a landmark to navigate by or at least confirm their location. I don't remember how that one was off'd but sometime in the 60';s it was controlled.

Last war story. This one a call went out to Adair again but he was out of country and unavailable. A working Oil well in south central Bakersfield caught fire between a residential area and a business area. Among the businesses was a really fine and well known French/ Basque restaurant called Mason Jaussod's (that's not the right spelling but the pronunciation was Joe-sode's). It was occasionally graced by movie stars and local well-to-dos. I was in school, living in East Bakersfield at the time, five or six miles from the location and it reminded me of the Wasco gas well fire only this one would belch great wads of flaming crude oil high into the sky and a putrid, if not toxic grey ash fell for hundreds of yards around. The Bakersfield city firefighters as well as oil field suppression teams kept water canons trained on it to keep the heat down. The rig and all the metal equipment for fifty feet around was melted and twisted. This one burned for about a week before they controlled and capped it.

When you see one of these well fires up close it is really impressive and my hard hat is off to anyone who braves that kind of danger.

Subject: RE: BS: John Wayne Movie Hellfighters
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 02 Apr 09 - 11:30 PM

Gas wells are going in all over North Texas. I suppose it is only a matter of time before something ignites one of those. There are going to end up being hundreds of urban wells.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: John Wayne Movie Hellfighters
From: Seamus Kennedy
Date: 03 Apr 09 - 03:08 AM

Red Adair was also brilliant dancing with Ginger Rogers.

Seamus

Subject: RE: BS: John Wayne Movie Hellfighters
From: SINSULL
Date: 03 Apr 09 - 02:06 PM

Seamus,
I will see that the cellar is ready for your arrival. Shame on you!
SINS

Subject: RE: BS: John Wayne Movie Hellfighters
From: SINSULL
Date: 03 Apr 09 - 02:07 PM

But Fred Astair was a minor character in Towering Inferno. Maybe that's what confused you.

Subject: RE: BS: John Wayne Movie Hellfighters
From: gnu
Date: 03 Apr 09 - 02:55 PM

There was a big fire at the oil refinery in Come-By-Chance, Newfoundland back in the 70s. It was announced that anyone who could put the flames out would get $1M. Adair and others tried but were beaten back. The local volunteer fire department truck roared down the hill to the shoreside refinery and directly into the flames.

Minutes turned to hours and most thought all hands were lost. Then, POOF! Fire out. A CBC News crew interviewed the Fire Captain and asked what they would do with the money... "First t'ing is gettin da fookin brakes on dat dere truck fixed eh!"