Firefighters use explosives to put out the Devil's Cigarette Lighter well fire - April 28th, 1962

On this day in 1962, armed with nearly 800 pounds of explosives, a team of firefighters led by Red Adair extinguished a massive natural gas well fire in the Sahara Desert.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that gives a quick look. It's something that
happened a long time ago. Today I'm Gay Bluesier, and
today we're talking about the time when an out of
control gas fire met its match in a forty six

(00:23):
year old Texan and a whole bunch of dynamite. The
day was April nineteen sixty two. Armed with nearly eight
hundred pounds of explosives, a team of firefighters led by

(00:43):
Redd A. Dare extinguished a massive natural gas well fire
in the Sahara Desert. The fire, which was nicknamed the
Devil's Cigarette Lighter, had been raging in the eastern Algerian
desert for nearly six months before a day or in
his team finally snuffed it out. The blaze had ignited

(01:04):
when a pipe in a natural gas well ruptured, launching
more than six thousand cubic feet of flaming gas into
the air every second. The stream of fire stretched eight
hundred feet into the sky and was fed by a
seemingly endless supply of natural gas. In fact, the pillar
of flame was so large and intense that astronaut John

(01:28):
Glenn reported seeing it from space as he orbited the Earth.
It would have taken years to extinguish the blaze through
conventional firefighting methods, so once it became clear that the
fire wasn't going to burn itself out anytime soon, Algeria
decided something unconventional was needed. The country called in read

(01:48):
A Dare, the world's foremost oil well firefighter and a
big proponent of fighting fire with fire. Paul Neil A.
Dare was born in Houston, Texas, on June eighteenth, nineteen fifteen.
As a teenager, he quit school in order to help
support his family, including his seven siblings. He worked at

(02:11):
a drug store, laid track for railroads, whatever he could
do to make money. Eventually, he took a job at
one of the state's many oil fields and continued in
that line of work for about seven years. Next, Adair
joined the Army, where he served as a member of
the one hundred and thirty ninth Bomb Disposal Squadron during

(02:32):
World War Two. It was around that time he got
the nickname Red, a reference not only to his red hair,
but to his soft spot for the color red. He
wore red clothes drove a red car and later used
the color for all his business equipment, uniforms, and pamphlets.
Once the war was over, Red Adair found work at

(02:54):
the MM Kinley Company, California based outfit that specialized in
controlling oil well blowouts and extinguishing well fires. The company's founder,
Myron Kinley, taught Rhetadair everything he knew about fighting fires,
including a new technique he had pioneered that involved the
use of dynamite. It sounds counterintuitive, but the physics support

(03:18):
the idea. When a bomb goes off, it momentarily sucks
all the oxygen from the surrounding area. That means that
with a carefully measured explosion, a well fire can be
temporarily starved of oxygen. Then, in that brief window and
the fire isn't burning, technicians can get close enough to
reseal the well with a plug. In nineteen fifty nine,

(03:43):
A Dair left Kinley and used what he had learned
to start his own company. Soon they were putting out
oil and gas well fires all over the world, including
in war zones, inland gas fields, and offshore oil rigs.
On average, A Dair and his team put out around
forty fires per year, many of which would have burned

(04:04):
for decades without their help. They didn't bomb every fire
they were called in to handle. In fact, Red designed
a whole fleet of equipment that didn't involve high explosives,
everything from water guns and high pressure turbines to semi
submersible boats that could be used to cap underwater wells
on offshore rigs. Sometimes, though bombing a fire was the

(04:28):
best bet for putting out a blaze, over time, Red
was able to perfect the method he had learned from Kinley,
and because of that expertise, he and his crew were
a natural choice to face off against the Devil's cigarette lighter.
The fire in Algeria erupted on November six, nine sixty one,
and before the end of the year, the red Adair

(04:50):
Company was on the scene devising a way to put
it out. The fire burned so intensely that the desert
sand around the whole had melted into glass. Without proper precautions,
anyone who got anywhere near the blaze would be vaporized
almost instantly. To prevent this, the crew needed a tremendous
amount of water and in the middle of the Sahara Desert,

(05:13):
that was a tall order. The company wound up having
to dig its own wells to source the water it needed.
The crew also had to construct three enormous reservoirs to
store the water they pumped from the wells. Each reservoir
was ten ft deep and roughly the size of a
soccer field. The water from these pits would not only

(05:34):
be used to control the blaze, but to keep the
crew and their equipment from burning up when they needed
to get closer to the fire. It took several months
of preparation, but on April sixty two, read A. Dare
and his team were finally ready to make their big push.
They had modified a bulldozer by adding a sixty foot

(05:55):
boom arm to the end of it. Attached to the
boom were about eight hundred pounds of explosives, and when
rolled close enough to the fire, they would ignite automatically.
As you might expect, Red Adair insisted on delivering the
payload personally. Dressed in his trademark red overalls and red
hard hat, he began driving the mobile bomb closer and

(06:19):
closer to the rim of the fuming inferno. Meanwhile, other crewmen,
also dressed in red overalls and hard hats sprayed their
boss with a constant stream of water to keep him
from vaporizing in the heat. After what must have felt
like an eternity, read position the bomb within just a
few feet of the flames. Without a moment to spare,

(06:42):
he took cover and then boom. The fire had roared
unchecked for a hundred and sixty seven days, but then
in an instant, it fell silent. It took another month
to remove the well head and place a cap on
the well, but in late May of nineteen sixty two,

(07:03):
the team got it done and the devil's cigarette lighter
had been snuffed out for good. After his victory in Algeria,
Red Adair became a household name, so much so that
even Hollywood came calling. Red Struck a deal, and in
nineteen sixty eight Universal released Hell Fighters, the story of
a cocky oil rig firefighter trying to repair his broken marriage.

(07:28):
A Dare and his colleague served as technical consultants on
the film, and the main character, played by John Wayne
was loosely based on a Dare himself. The movie wasn't
a hit at the box office or with critics, but
in A Dair's mind, it was still a huge win.
He later said of the experience, quote, that's one of

(07:48):
the best honors in the world to have the Duke
play you in a movie. Over the course of nearly
fifty years, the Red Adair Company extinguished thousands of fires
world one. Red finally retired from fighter fighting himself in
though he would continue to work as a consultant until
his death in two thousand four, at the age of

(08:10):
eighty nine. Red's company typically earned millions of dollars for
each oil well fire they extinguished, and those big pay
days didn't go unnoticed by the press. When asked about it,
Read famously exclaimed quote, if you think it's expensive to
hire a professional to do a job, wait until you
hire an amateur. You might think that's just Texas swagger,

(08:33):
but consider this. In all his years in one of
the world's most dangerous businesses, read Adair never lost a
single member of his crew. In fact, according to him,
no one was ever seriously injured on a job either.
That record speaks highly of red skill and leadership, but
it's also worth mentioning that he was crushed, burned, and

(08:56):
temporarily blinded on the job more than once. So his
idea of what constituted a serious injury was probably a
little different than yours are mine. I'm Gabe Lousier and
hopefully you now know a little more about history today
than you did yesterday. If you have a second and

(09:16):
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Mays for producing the show, and thank you for listening.

(09:38):
I'll see you back here again tomorrow for another day
in History class.