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Oil well firefighter Red Adair dies
Legendary oil field firefighter Paul "Red" Adair, a fearless Texan who put out massive oil well fires around the globe, including Australia, and who died at the weekend, had been in ill health for several years, his family said. Adair died of natural causes at a Houston hospital at age 89. The stocky, homespun Adair got his start in the oil fields of southern Texas during the Great Depression and went on to extinguish nearly 3000 oil well fires in more than 50 years of firefighting. Among them were 119 fires in Kuwaiti oil fields at the end of the 1991 Gulf War, the infamous "Devil's Cigarette Lighter" in Algeria in 1962 whose 240-metre flames were seen from space by astronaut John Glenn, the 1979 blowout of Mexico's Ixtoc-1 well in the Bay of Campeche and the 1988 Piper Alpha platform disaster in the North Sea that killed 167 men.
Posted by: Steve 2004-08-09 |
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