From the first days of the now infamous Deepwater Horizon oil rig fire and subsequent never-ending oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I have been wishing that there was really a hero like John Wayne’s character in the 1968 movie Hellfighters.
I like just about all of John Wayne’s movies, but next to McLintock, Hellfighters
is my favorite. I not only enjoyed watching John Wayne’s macho oil well firefighter Chance Buckman, but also his feisty daughter, Tish (Katherine Ross), and her sweetheart, Greg Parker (Jim Hutton).
I didn’t realize that John Wayne’s role in the movie was based on a real person until I mentioned the movie and my regret that it wasn’t real to my dad. He instantly agreed and said we need another Red Adair. Dad remembered watching news reports of Adair’s exploits. An internet search quickly brings up a list of Adair’s successes. He is perhaps best known for extinguishing an oil well fire dubbed the “Devil’s Cigarette Lighter” in 1962. According to the BBC, the pillar of flame from the fire in a gas field in the Sahara Desert was visible to astronaut John Glenn as he orbited the earth. Adair blew the fire out with 500 tons of explosives and capped the well.
Thatis when he was immortalized in the movie Hellfighters,
but it wasn’t the end of his career. He went on to tackle an offshore oil rig fire called Piper Alpha in the North Sea in 1988. Adair is quoted as saying that was his greatest challenge. Not only did he have to fight the fireon a platform destroyed by an explosion, he had to do it in 80 mph winds and 70-foot seas. Adair was able to get the fires under control in three weeks by pumping cement into the wells and capping them.
Adair continued his amazing career into his 70s, working to extinguish the Kuwaiti oilfields that had been set ablaze by Saddam Hussein’s troops in the first Gulf War. According to an account of the task in The Guardian,
Adair came up with a revolutionary idea. He used the pipelines that normally carried oil away from the fields to stations on the Persian Gulf, reversing them to carry salt water from the Gulf back to fight the fires. Adair flew to Washington to testify to get the necessary equipment. He got it. And he got the job done in nine months when “experts” had predicted it would take five years or more.
We need Red Adair. Unfortunately, the oil well troubleshooter died in August 2004 at the age of 89, after an amazing career of stopping environmental disasters in their tracks. And sadly, no one has taken his place.
Instead of a brave and enterprising businessman, we now have teams of lawyers and investigators and policy makers. We have government speak press releases that announce re-organization of the Minerals Management Service as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.
We don’t need more paperwork, unless there is a way to get the paperwork to fill the leak contaminating our ocean. We need someone who can get the get the job done.
Unhappy the land
that is in need of heroes.
Bertolt Brecht
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