The Fire Beater

On a well drilling platform, 14 miles off the Louisiana bayou shore, there was a sudden roar. Into the air shot great hissing sheets of flame. What oilmen fear worst--a well "blowout" and fire--had set aflame two of Pure Oil Co.'s gas wells.

The oilmen knew what to do. They put in a hurry call to the world's most famous oil-fire fighter, 53-year-old Myron Kinley. As marks of his calling, Kinley has a permanently crippled right leg and carries masses of scar tissue all over his body. The call found him at his Bel-Air mansion near Hollywood, where he likes to cool off in his private swimming pool between alarms. Within three hours, he hopped a plane east, carrying nothing but a change of shirt, and socks--and his enormous knowledge of fire fighting.

At the scene, he found part of the well platform a mass of wreckage. The wells' damaged "Christmas trees" (i.e., cluster of valves topping the well pipe) kept the flames close to the platform, making the area too hot to approach. Kinley borrowed a four-man Army team from Louisiana's Camp Polk, tried to shoot off the trees with 75-mm. recoilless rifles. The tree of one well was shot off. Kinley got Pure Oil's crews to weld together a 90-ft. boom of pipe tipped with a big loop and cooled by hundreds of gallons of water pumped through it. With it, he hooked off the tree of the other. The gas then shot out of the wells so fast that the flames were pushed 90 ft. above the platform, giving it a chance to cool. This week, Kinley plans to drop explosives into the wells, snuff out the fires with the blast.

Luck & Danger. Kinley, who is called the "indispensable man" of the oil industry, owes his highly profitable trade to an accidental discovery. His father made his living "shooting" oil wells (i.e., dynamiting them to loosen the oil-bearing formations). One day in 1913, when a well caught fire he discovered that a dynamite blast could snuff it out. Myron and his younger brother Floyd concentrated on oil-well fire fighting. In 1931, when Myron went to Rumania to put out a fire which had raged for two years, his fame became international.

Every new fire was a new problem. In Rumania, the caved-in well had made a crater 250 ft. wide and 65 ft. deep filled with small ground fires and a tangled web of melted pipeline. It took Kinley six months to lick the fire. In Oklahoma, when his leg was caught in some machinery and broken, Kinley got it set in a cast, went back to direct the fire fighting from horseback. In Venezuela, when shifting winds blew the fire on to him, he spent five weeks on his stomach in a hospital recuperating. In Texas, in 1938, he saw a blast of well gas kill his brother Floyd. But the dangerous game held a lure that Myron could not resist.

Two years ago, flying 7,500 miles in 60 hours, he landed in Iran for perhaps his toughest job. An Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. well was burning at the bottom of a cup-like rim of hills which held in the heat until the temperature registered 250DEG even some distance away. He showed Anglo-Iranian's crews how to rig up a bulldozer with asbestos-lined iron shields, got them to lay a 22-mile pipeline to the nearest river to pump in water to the work. Under the spray, he used the armored bulldozer to shove dynamite in an oil barrel close to the well, eleven days later dropped another loaded barrel from a loft. crane, and put out the fire with the two blasts.

Personal Demon. Hardworking, hard-cussing Kinley, a Californian by birth, has put out 300 fires, has few rivals (many other fire fighters have been killed). He is wealthy enough to retire on his fire fighting earnings (an estimated $100,000 a year), plus royalties on oilfield tools, sold by a company he owns in Houston. But Kinley, who regards fire as a personal demon always scheming to outwit him, can never resist the next jangle of the long-distance fire bell. Says he: "I guess I'll retire when they carry me out."

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