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| -Short Attention Span Theater- | |
| Oil well firefighter Red Adair dies | |
| 2004-08-09 | |
| 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.
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| Posted by:Steve |
| #5 Look up "Brass Ones" in the encyclopedia, it should have a picture od this guy. |
| Posted by: Oldspook 2004-08-09 21:11 |
| #4 A true blood American hero and a gift to the world. Rest in peace, Red Adair. |
| Posted by: Capt America 2004-08-09 18:13 |
| #3 Folks, this is what you call cheating death. I expect his last thoughts were the same as Doc Holidays were reputed to be "Damn, they're on" RIP |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-08-09 4:03:00 PM |
| #2 Rest in peace, Red! What a giant of a man who died the USA and Texas proud! He will be missed and this man wrote the book on fighting oil fires. |
| Posted by: GreatestJeneration 2004-08-09 1:50:18 PM |
| #1 My late mother worked for Frontier Oil in Colorado just before WWII, and whenever there was a sticky problem, Frontier would call Adair and he would come up by train from Texas to survey the situation. She remembered that the enginers viewed him as this "young genius" who could fix anything (He was in his 20's at the time). |
| Posted by: BigEd 2004-08-09 1:30:25 PM |