Algeria, 1962

This post is five years old. I re-post it again today with great pride in the knowledge that I personally knew these three men, worked for two of them several years and at one time or another all of them told me a story or two about this great well in North Africa. I remember those stories like they were yesterday.

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PREFACE

Please try to overlook the watermarks on some of these images the best you can, with my apologies. They were taken of the great Algerian gas fire called the Devil's Cigarette Lighter in 1962 by famous French photographer, Maurice Jarnoux (1907-1969). Getty Images now owns the copyrights. I tried to buy a JPEG of one of these images and the best they would agree to is renting it to me, for 3 years, for $800.

I was later told by a photographer friend of mine that Jarnoux's images of the Devil's Cigarette Lighter in Algeria in 1961-62, 15 total, would sell for something like $200,000 each in today's market. If I photoshopped the watermark out of the image, or cropped it, to post here on Oily Stuff, Getty would end up owning me. Having had a number of my photographs published without my permission, I understand. There are otherwise few photographs of this great blowout other than those taken by Jarnoux and owned by Getty, or very few personal photos taken by Red, Boots or Coots that I have in my files. The Getty images are of superb quality, and you will enjoy them, even with the watermarks.

Red Adair & Maurice Jarnoux, 1962. Note the Red Adair Company sticker on his North African "company car."

The Algerian Sahara

Natural gas was first discovered in the Touli Province of the Ouargla Region of Northern Algeria in 1960 by a JV that included Phillips Petroleum, Gulf Oil and several others. The Gassi Touli 1 well was drilled low on a very large structure.

The area consists of seven different wet gas fields at various locations on the same bifurcated structure, now mostly all operated by Spanish companies, like Sonatrach SpA.

Known cumulative natural gas production from the region exceeds 17 TCF and several billion barrels of liquids.

The Gassi Touli No. 2 well was spud in early 1961, several hundred feet structurally high to the No. 1 well. It blew out in early November of the same year. For critical flow rates from a well with loss of surface control, it is believed to the biggest ever recorded. When the well caught fire in December, triangulation surveys placed the top of the fire at 1,000 above ground level.

I once asked my late, PE buddy, Larry Flak (of Kuwait fame). what he thought the estimated flow was from this well and he could only venture a guess based on casing sizes. He shrugged his shoulders and suggested over 500 MMCFPD. In Adairs book, An American Hero, the same volume was used.

Boots volunteered once that they were scared to death of shutting the well in and after it was capped and on two 6 inch diverter lines, one diverter line had a little south of 5,000 PSI FP on it.

When John Glenn orbited the earth in 1962 (Mercury) he could look down from space into the North African desert and see the fire, which he aptly named, the Devil's Cigarette Lighter

In the photo above a great deal of rig debris has already been cleared away. This may be a Jarnoux image but it never had a Getty watermark on it when I got it in 1995. Left to right, Red, Coots and Boots walking into the breach.

Red is quoted as saying this well was so big it created its own weather and above the dozer in this particular photograph you can see heat & wind vortexes that Red said would, "suck the hard hat off your head."

That is Coots watching Red throw his hard hat down, probably showing off a little for whomever took the photo.

Below, The Red Adair Company, all photos taken in Algeria 1961 & 1962:

Red Adair (1915-2004)

Coots Matthews (1923 -2010)

Boots Hansen (1926-2019)

Charlie Tolar (1937-2003).

On the right is Charlie Tolar, an All-American football player from LSU who went on to play fullback for the Houston Oilers. At 5'6 and 220 lbs. he was known as the "human bowling ball." He and Red got to be friends and Charlie always asked Red to take him on a big fire. Tolar played in the 1962 AFC Championship game then went to Algeria that spring on his first, and last oil well firefighting campaign, ironically one of the biggest fires in world history. He hung in there, did his job and survived.

Boots and Coots were the first on the scene in Algeria in early November of 1961; Red was back in Texas on another job near Fort Stockton. The No. 2 well was blowing hard into the reserve pits and around the drill pipe, several hundred feet above the crown.

Initially they thought there was a chance the well could be pumped dead thru a TIW valve stuck in the drill pipe. Coots had followed Boots up into the derrick to chain back a chiksan and hose tied onto the TIW valve before trying to pump the well dead with mud.

"Something didn't feel right," Coots said, and he looked across the derrick to Boots, gave the slashing hand across the throat signal and pointed down. They climbed down the derrick legs and off the floor, walked a hundred yards or so out in the sand and the well ignited. Had they stayed in the derrick another 3 minutes the ignition would have killed them both.

What Coots described as not "feeling right" was that he was getting shocked every time he touched metal in the derrick and that the hair on his arms was standing straight up all the time. Turned out what he was feeling was static electricity from a dry desert wind and that is what likely ignited the well.

When it turned lose the well blew all the drill pipe out the hole and sent it clanging thru the derrick. The derrick fell in less than an hour. In the photo above we can see 4,500 feet of 4 1/2in. O.D. XO drill pipe and the BHA lying in the desert sand.

Gas fires are not typically as hot as oil fires but this well was blowing so hard it melted everything around it for 60 yards into discernible scrap iron.

Adair's first trip to Algeria led to a stopover in Paris to meet with Phillips engineers and French authorities, all of whom offered Red great assurances that it was safe to work in Algeria that in 1961 was in the middle of sort of a revolution and quite dangerous. He arrived at the Gassi Touli No. 2 (GT2) on Thanksgiving Day. The fire was so big it even impressed Red.

He spent four days surveying the situation and developing a plan for water, putting American engineers in charge. He left Algeria to attend to other problems around the world and he and Boots and Coots visited the GT2 on different occasions over the next 4 months to check on progress, the arrival of pumps, manifolds, an Athey Wagon boom, and the commencement of a relief well to intersect the blowout formation in surface control attempts failed.

In April of 1962 The Red Adair Company, including Charlie, met in Algiers and drove out to well in the same Red Adair company car, Coots with his knees pulled up into his chest. The final push to control GT2 was about to begin. Rig debris was pulled away and the area around the well cleaned completely. The heat from the fire was so intense that it had turned the desert sand into a glass plate 40 feet around the casing.

To see if Charlie had what it was going to take, Red gave him a piece of tin, and they both walked with 60 yards of the well. Charlie would later say he had never been more scared in all his life but trusted Red and did exactly what he was told.

Above and below, Adair engineering and final tweaks to the capping stack.

The Jarnoux image above is of Red, Boots and Coots loading the shot drum that blew the fire out, spring, 1962. Red is holding a plastic bag of caps, Coots is looking into the drum helping Red count and that is Boots behind Coots unwrapping more glycerin. They were meticulously loading 750 pounds of glycerin in this fabricated drum, mounted on the back of the Athey Wagon boom. Inside the big drum is a smaller drum and chemical fire retarder was packed between the two drums for some reason only Adair knew. Red could "shape" these explosive charges by packing the shot drums in a certain way, as he is reported to have done in Algeria.

Ready to go. The drum will now be wrapped with layers of asbestos cloth before backed into the base of the fire.

A 2o foot deep ditch was cut the width of a dozer blade and when the shot was placed properly and the wires all laid back to the detonator, everybody ran back to the ditch 200 years away. Coots said that when the shot went off everybody down in the ditch bounced in the air a foot, Red and Charlie maybe two feet because they were both so small.

One shot. The fire was out!

This is very good British Pathe film of the work being done to prepare for shooting the fire out at the GT2 well in Algeria, April 1962. It is a good film, with no sound.

I recommend watching a full-length feature, narrated by Red himself, that is 34 minutes long and can be found any number of places on the internet, including YouTube, below.

In Part 4 of this YouTube series, you can focus on pre-capping scenes that show the gas flow belling out of the wellhead flange restricted only by the OD of the casing. The flow rate of this well was enormous and if somebody had gotten their head above the flow, or a hand in the flow, they would have been dead instantly. The vacuum a well like this creates right below the casing sucks oxygen up with it and it is hard to breathe when working.

Boots said the rush of air going up made it feel cold, like an air conditioner and Coots always blamed this "sumbitch" for his bad hearing.

By going directly to YouTube you can watch the entire film in the remaining three parts

This was the job that pretty much made Red Adair world famous, from CBS News to the New York Times. It was likely the impetus for the writing of Hellfighters, starring John Wayne, that began filming not long after the job in North Africa was finished.

Red and Boots and Coots stayed together until 1978 and were the world's premier oil well firefighters for over 19 years, often as many as 30 or 40 blowouts a year. The Red Adair Company's logo always included the words, "Around the Clock, Around the World."

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EPILOG

I've told several stories about Coots Matthews here on Oily Stuff. Coots was my hero and one of the greatest honors in my life to work with him, and for him. Here's another Coots story about the Devil's Cigarette Lighter in 1961-62 he used to tell all the time...

In April, 1962 Red, Boots and Coots left Houston together to fly to North Africa to finalize the kill and capping. Charlie Tolar was already there making water preparations, etc. The three of them flew to Paris via Pan American and were sitting in the first-class lounge waiting to make their next connection when Joy Hamilton, Red's secretary in Houston, paged him to say a big job came up in Mexico. Red thought it over and decided to send Coots back to handle the job in Mexico; he could catch up with them in Algeria later. Within an hour Coots was on another Pan American flight back to New York.

There he had a two hour layover before going on to Mexico City. Sitting in the first class lounge having his 9th Crown and water of the day, Joy paged Coots to say the job in Mexico had bridged, they didn't need him after all, she had talked to Red and Red said get another flight and come to Algeria ASAP.

Within an hour Coots was settling into his first class seat headed for Paris, again, when a stewardess came by to fluff his pillow and ask him what he wanted to drink before takeoff.

She coyly asked him, "sir, will this be your first transatlantic flight?"

Coots grinned and said, "darlin,' if we get across this time it will be my 3rd one today."