Red Adair

Paul Neal ("Red") Adair, oilwell firefighter: born Houston, Texas 18 June 1915; married (two children); died Houston 7 August 2004.

If ever there was a "larger than life" character, it was Red Adair. Physically he stood a mere 5 foot 7 inches, a stocky figure who appeared as broad as he was tall, most often depicted in his habitual red overalls that gave him his nickname. But he became a 20th-century American legend, utterly dominating one of the 20th century's most vital niche markets, that of extinguishing oilfield fires.

He was one of the few people whose name became synonymous with his trade. No matter that your closest contact with the oil industry was filling up the family car with petrol on a Saturday morning; the odds were, you not only knew Red Adair's name, but exactly what he did as well. By the time he died he had been the subject of countless newspaper articles, at least two books, and a film. In the final decade of his life, even a rock band was named after him.

Adair's derring-do started young. He was born Paul Neal Adair in Houston in 1915. His father was a blacksmith, of Irish origin. He himself was one of eight children, and spent some of his early years in an orphanage. There he had no choice but to learn how to stick up for himself - "I was always at the front of a fight because I was always the smallest," he once told an interviewer.

No scholar, he left high school early to take jobs to help support the family. In 1938 Adair took his first oil-related job, with the Otis Pressure Control Company, and worked on the Texas oilfields in various capacities until he was called up for army service in 1945. By then the path was set. Adair served in a bomb-disposal unit in Japan, searching for unexploded shells and disarming them.

Upon his return to the United States, he went to work for Myron Kinley, the pioneer of oilwell blow-out and fire-control technology, before setting up his own firm, Red Adair Company Inc, in 1959. Three years later, Adair laid the first stones in his legend by putting out a colossal gas fire in the Sahara desert in Algeria, dubbed the Devil's Cigarette Lighter. The inferno, fuelled by 550 million cubic feet of gas a day, had been blazing for six months. Most experts believed it could never be extinguished. Adair and his team proved the experts wrong.

In the decades that followed, major oilfield disasters and Red Adair were inseparable. Armed with the latest technologies his company had developed, he was there to "blow out the candle" in the huge 1970 offshore blaze at Bay Marchand in Louisiana, the April 1977 Bravo blow-out in the North Sea, the IXTOC-1 blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico in 1979, and the Piper Alpha explosion in the North Sea in 1988 - the greatest offshore disaster in history, in which 167 men died.

Inevitably he was called into service after the 1991 Gulf war, to save the Kuwaiti oilfields left ablaze by the retreating army of Saddam Hussein. Adair and his men extinguished 117 wells. Estimates were that the monumental rescue operation would take between three and five years; it was completed in nine months.

Adair delightedly spent his 76th birthday on the job in the Kuwaiti desert. "I don't know what the word 'retire' means," he said at the time. "I've got too many of my friends that retired, went home and got on a rocking chair - and, about a year and a half later, I'm always going to the cemetery."

In fact even he ultimately bowed to the advancing years in 1994, retiring and selling his company. The legend however was long since sealed. For Americans, Adair epitomised their country and the way it liked to see itself. He was a tough guy, with a "can-do" mentality that considered no task impossible. He possessed a courage sometimes verging on the reckless, and a readiness to answer his country's call (as demonstrated by his epic work in Kuwait, at the express summons of President George H.W. Bush).

To cap it all, he had that jaunty, wise-cracking swagger which Americans love. "Kuwait was easy," he declared after a feat which had amazed the world - and probably saved it from an environmental calamity as well - as offhandedly as if he had been plucking apples from a tree. "We put out all the fires with water, just went from one to the other." Only Adair, when asked about the colossal fees his services commanded, could reply: "If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur."

There was a distinct frontier quality about Adair too. He could only have been a Texan; indeed the legends of the oilwell fire-fighter and the Lone Star state fed into each other. Inevitably a film (Hellfighters in 1968) was made about him; equally inevitably, the actor who played him was John Wayne, another man operating where American reality spilled over into myth.

A citation from the first President Bush summed up the way his country felt about Red Adair.

You have probably saved more oil than any single individual in the world. You demonstrate . . . that American ingenuity, skill and self-discipline can master the seemingly impossible. In an age said to be without heroes, you are an authentic hero.

History is unlikely to disagree with that verdict.

Rupert Cornwell