Famed oilfield well control expert and firefighter Paul “Red†Adair died at age 89 in Houston August 7 2004. The son of a blacksmith, Adair was born in 1915 in Houston. He served with a U.S. Army bomb disposal unit during World War II.
Adair began his career working for Myron Macy Kinley, who patented a technology for using charges of high explosives to snuff out well fires. Kinley, whose father had been oil well shooter in California in the early 1900s, also mentored “Boots†Hansen and “Coots†Mathews (Boots & Coots), and other firefighters.
Adair, who founded the Red Adair Company in 1959, developed many new techniques for “wild well†control. Over the years his company put out more than 2,000 dangerous well fires and blowouts – onshore and offshore, all over the world.
The oilfield firefighter’s skills, dramatized in the 1968 John Wayne film Hellfighters, were tested in 1991 when Adair and his company extinguished 117 oil well fires set in Kuwait by Saddam Hussein’s retreating Iraqi army.
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