Red Adair, the Munroe Effect, & the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter

On 20 February 1962, John Glenn became the third American to visit space, as Friendship 7 left Earth. When the craft successfully orbited our planet, Glenn was the first American to circle Earth above the atmosphere.

He orbited three times during the nearly five-hour mission, giving Glenn a viewpoint that only two Soviets had yet seen, full of vast blue oceans and puzzle-piece continents. These sights were likely marvelous to Glenn, but he expected to see them.

However, he probably didn’t anticipate a flash over the Algerian Sahara. As Glenn floated over Africa, he caught a massive light in the desert that shouldn’t have been there. If his mission had been half a year earlier, the sandy expanse would have appeared to be a blank tableau. Instead, Glenn got a Friendship-eyed view of what became known as the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter.

This ominously named fire began in Algeria on 6 November 1961, when static electricity caused a Philips Petroleum Company natural gas pipe to conflagrate. Flames shot to 800 feet, as 6,000 cubic feet of natural gas poured from the ground every second. All the human-made infrastructure surrounding the location became instantaneous wreckage. The sand below it melted into glass.

By the time Glenn saw it from space, the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter had raged for four and a half months. No end to the inferno seemed possible.

How could humans snuff such a gargantuan, dangerous situation?

The answer arrived in equal parts expertise, moxie, and perhaps counterintuitively, explosions!

As oil became the dominant mode of energy production, oil wells sprung up across the world. Unfortunately, the extraction of substances meant to combust is susceptible to combustion. Lightning, static electricity, cigarettes, or any other form of firestarter could easily set wells alight. Well fires were not only economic hindrances to the burgeoning industry but also extraordinarily dangerous. The ability to extinguish these fires became nearly as valuable as the extractions.

In 1913, Karl Kinley, an oil well “shooter” from California, a professional who sent nitroglycerin “torpedos” into underperforming wells in an attempt to break rocks, used dynamite to detonate a wellhead that had caught fire. For a moment, the blaze subsided, though it quickly reignited. Standing nearby had been Kinley’s son, Myron, who realized he had just watched chemistry birth a new industry.

Myron Kinley served in World War I, where he worked with explosives. After the conflict, he returned to California to work as a shooter with his brother, Floyd. The brothers heard about an oil well fire in Oklahoma that had stymied workers for weeks, resisting efforts to put it out with water and dirt, the common methods of the era. Myron recalled 1913 and thought he could solve the Oklahoma issue. He had correctly understood that the fire had stopped burning because the dynamite explosion had emptied the area of oxygen, a needed ingredient for combustion. Myron Kinley believed he could stop oil well fires with ease by utilizing explosives to “blow out” the fires.

The Kinleys became black gold superstars.

Their success came with a cost, though. Myron suffered a debilitating leg injury in 1936, though he continued to work. Floyd perished during a blowout in Texas in 1938. Myron soldiered onward, putting out fires, but, ffter Floyd died, he realized he needed assistance.

Enter Paul Adair, affectionately known as Red.

Under Myron’s tutelage, Adair became the most prolific and famous oil well firefighter of all time. Adair served in World War II in a bomb disposal unit. There, he learned about a technique employed in the atomic bomb and bazookas. With their combined explosives expertise, Adair and Kinley developed a process that greatly improved the accuracy of Kinley’s extinguishing method.

Before, firefighters needed to perfectly place large bombs on the fires to be assured of success, a highly dangerous proposition. Adair and Kinley employed a strategy based on shaped charges. Normally, explosives radiate in all directions. With enough material, typical explosions are effective, but they can be ineffective against plating, such as steel. This reality led to the early success of tanks on battlefields. Explosions simply did not produce enough oomph to penetrate the armor of a tank. However, in 1888, a chemist named Charles Munroe discovered that shaping the casing of an explosive could drastically alter its effect. If one molded a charge to funnel in one direction, the explosion focused in that direction, causing extraordinary damage. Further, if one lines the inside of the charge with specific substances, such as copper, the explosion deforms the lining and forms a jet of molten metal that rockets out of the container. This jet can punch holes in thick steel. Extraordinarily, it does not melt holes through metal; the explosion and jet create enough kinetic energy to blast through the material.

Now known as the Munroe effect, this innovation had wide-reaching implications for warfare. It also enabled Adair and Kinley to snuff fires with precision and safety.

As Kinley aged, his protege began to take over as the world’s foremost oil well firefighter. He tackled more than 2,000 misbehaving wells, often solving issues that others could not overcome.

So, when the Devil decided to light a cigarette in Algeria, Philips called Red Adair to save the day.

The fire was so immense that it took Adair five months just to prepare the scene. Smoldering ruins needed to be removed, lest they cause a reignition. They dug reservoirs for vast amounts of water and, being in a desert, drilled for it themselves.

In April 1962, Red Adair drove a decked-out bulldozer toward the flame with 550 pounds of nitroglycerin in a shaped charge. The resulting explosion starved the fire of oxygen. The crews pumped water into the well for two days in an attempt to cool it, then filled it with drilling mud to reduce the amount of natural gas escaping. Finally, they capped the well.

With the Cigarette Lighter doused, Adair became a worldwide phenomenon. By the end of the decade, John Wayne starred in a film called Hellfighters, based on Adair’s exploits.

Red Adair continued to attack oil well fires for the next several decades. He was so proficient, talented, and wily that, at age 75, he helped extinguish hundreds of fires in Kuwait after the Gulf War in 1991.

Both Myron Kinley and Red Adair managed to survive the dangerous profession, both dying naturally, in 1978 and 2004, respectively.

Modern methods for dealing with fires in these settings and at these scales have evolved with technology, but Kinley and Adair blazed (or snuffed out) an impressive trail. As incredible as massive fires, such as the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter, are, the methods and grit of the firefighters are a marvel the Devil would need to respect.