Called ‘Red’ because of his flame-coloured hair, Paul Neal Adair’s first job was stoking the smithy fire for his blacksmith father in his home town of Houston, Texas.
In 1938, aged 23, he was working as a labourer on an oil rig when a valve blew and he was thrown 50ft (15m) into the air. While everyone else ran for cover, he – although bruised and badly shaken – calmly replaced the valve.
His courage was noted by the pioneer American oil fire-fighter Myron Kinley, who asked young Adair to help him deal with a blow-out in Alice, Texas. The two men worked together until the United States entered the Second World War in 1941. Adair became a bomb-disposal expert in the Pacific, but was reunited with Kinley after the war. He stayed with him until 1959 when he formed the Red Adair Oil Well Fires and Blow-outs Control, with the motto: ‘Around the Clock, Around the World.’
Three years later, his success at Gassi Touil made world headlines. His fame quickly grew and in 1968 his dare-devil exploits inspired a Hollywood film, Hellfighters, staring John Wayne as an intrepid oil-well fireman. But some of Adair’s most dramatic feats were still to come. These have ranged from snuffing oil fires in the Gulf of Mexico of Mexico to the North Sea – including the Piper Alpha oil-platform disaster off the north-east coast of Scotland in the summer of 1988.
A multimillionaire and grandfather, Red Adair works out of an office in Houston which – like his automobile and his automobile and his powerboat – is coloured fire-engine red. In his 50-odd years of fire-fighting he has dealt with more than 1000 oil-well flare-ups and blow-outs.
‘There are two things I really like about my job,’ he once told an interviewer. ‘When the phone rings I never know where I’m heading to next – and I’m never bothered by life-insurance salesman!’
Picture Credit : Google