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.