The original Hellfighter

Red Adair, who started out as a roughneck in an Oklahoma oilfield in the Thirties and wound up the go-to guy when your oil or gas well was on fire, died this weekend in Houston at 89.

After World War II, during which he was part of a bomb-disposal unit, Paul N. Adair went to work for Myron Kinley, who had built a business controlling oilfield fires, and set up his own company in 1959. He stayed with it for thirty-five years, taking on the scariest assignments imaginable and inspiring the 1968 film Hellfighters, starring John Wayne and crediting Adair as technical advisor — though it was the Wayne character's assistant, played by Jim Hutton, who proved to be the real hothead on screen.

In 1991, Adair, then seventy-six, was brought in by the Kuwaiti government to tame the dozens of oil wells set ablaze during the Gulf War, a project predicted to last three to five years, which Adair's team finished in less than nine months.

Red Adair feared no fire, on earth or elsewhere; he quipped in 1991 that he'd struck a deal with the devil "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." Myself, I rather think he's gone somewhere with better climate.

Posted at 6:01 PM to Almost Yogurt