The Devil's Cigarette Lighter was a natural gas well fire at Gassi Touil in the Sahara Desert of Algeria. The fire was ignited on November 6, 1961, and burned until being extinguished by Red Adair and his colleagues, who used explosives to deprive the flame of oxygen, on April 28, 1962.
The fire was ignited by static electricity when a pipe at the GT2 well ruptured on November 6, 1961. The Phillips Petroleum Company/OMNIREX/COPEFA-owned well produced more than 6,000 cubic feet (170 m3) of natural gas per second, and the flame rose between 450 feet (140 m) and 800 feet (240 m). The flame was seen from orbit by John Glenn [1] [2] during the flight of Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962. The blowout and fire were estimated to have consumed enough gas to supply Paris for three months, burning 550,000,000 cubic feet (16,000,000 m3) per day. [3] [4] [5]
Preparations to extinguish the fire took five months, and were led by well fire expert Red Adair. Adair worked the fire with Asger "Boots" Hansen and Ed "Coots" Matthews, who later formed the Boots & Coots well control company. [6] [7] Adair's team cleared wreckage from near the wellhead with shielded bulldozers, dug wells, and excavated three reservoirs for water supplies.
On April 28, 1962, Adair used a modified bulldozer with a 66-foot (20 m) arm to move a metal drum containing a 550-pound (250 kg) nitroglycerin charge to the well. Adair, Matthews, Hansen and Charlie Tolar rode the rig, protected by a metal heat shield and water sprays, with Adair driving and the others on a shielded platform while medical teams and evacuation helicopters stood by. After positioning the explosives, the team ran to a trench about 150 feet (46 m) from the well. The explosion extinguished the fire by displacing oxygen from the area of the ruptured well. Water from the reservoirs was used to flood the area for two days to cool the well. [3] [4] Drilling mud was pumped into the hole to control the flow of gas and the well was capped after four days of work. [8] Lateral wells to the GT2 well bore pumped mud into the bore to help to control the flow of gas. [5]
The exploit made Adair a celebrity. [1] Part of the John Wayne movie Hellfighters (1968) was loosely based upon the feats of Adair during the 1962 Sahara Desert fire.
The Kuwaiti oil fires were caused by the Iraqi military setting fire to a reported 605 to 732 oil wells along with an unspecified number of oil filled low-lying areas, such as oil lakes and fire trenches, as part of a scorched earth policy while retreating from Kuwait in 1991 due to the advances of US-led coalition forces in the Gulf War. The fires were started in January and February 1991, and the first oil well fires were extinguished in early April 1991, with the last well capped on November 6, 1991.
Paul Neal "Red" Adair was an American oil well firefighter. He became notable internationally as an innovator in the specialized and hazardous profession of extinguishing and capping oil well blowouts, both land-based and offshore.
Hellfighters is a 1968 American adventure film directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and starring John Wayne, Katharine Ross, Jim Hutton and Vera Miles. The movie depicts a group of oil well firefighters and is based loosely on the life of Red Adair. Adair, "Boots" Hansen, and "Coots" Matthews served as technical advisers on the film.
A blowout is the uncontrolled release of crude oil and/or natural gas from an oil well or gas well after pressure control systems have failed. Modern wells have blowout preventers intended to prevent such an occurrence. An accidental spark during a blowout can lead to a catastrophic oil or gas fire.
Oil well fires are oil or gas wells that have caught on fire and burn. They can be the result of accidents, arson, or natural events, such as lightning. They can exist on a small scale, such as an oil field spill catching fire, or on a huge scale, as in geyser-like jets of flames from ignited high pressure wells. A frequent cause of a well fire is a high-pressure blowout during drilling operations.
"Fire at Rig 15" is the 19th episode of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, a British Supermarionation television series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Written by Bryan Cooper and directed by Ken Turner, it was first broadcast on 16 February 1968 on ATV Midlands.
Boots & Coots was a well control company. It was founded in 1978 by Asger "Boots" Hansen and Ed "Coots" Matthews, veterans of the Red Adair Service and Marine Company. The two companies extinguished approximately one third of the more than 700 oil well fires set in Kuwait by retreating Iraqi soldiers in the Gulf War. This work was featured in the 1992 film Lessons of Darkness.
Gassi Touil is a large natural gas field in the Sahara Desert region of Grand Erg Oriental of Algeria, within the commune of Hassi Messaoud. It is an outlying part of the Berkine Basin, itself a region of the Ghadames Basin that extends into Tunisia. The land surface is dominated by extensive sand dune fields.