``Red is truly one of a kind,'' longtime friend and Houston television anchorman Dave Ward said at Adair's funeral service. ``In his dangerous line of work, his attention to detail paid off. He never lost a man.''
Adair died Saturday of natural causes at a Houston hospital. He was 89.
More than 350 people crowded a funeral home chapel, where Adair's casket was covered with roses and his red firefighting jumpsuit and silver helmet were hung nearby.
Adair, who earned the nickname ``Hellfighter,'' is credited with battling more than 2,000 land and offshore oil well fires before retiring in 1994. His death-defying feats included battling the 1988 explosion of the Piper Alpha platform that killed 167 men in the stormy North Sea, 120 miles off the coast of Scotland.
Former President George H.W. Bush issued a statement calling Adair a true hero, ``a friend, a wonderful human being and a patriot.''
``He will be sorely missed,'' Bush said.
Adair's teams were among the first of 27 teams from 16 countries that spent eight months capping 732 Kuwaiti wells after the Persian Gulf War in 1991. His expertise helped shorten an operation that had been expected to last three to five years, saving millions of barrels of oil and stopping an intercontinental air pollution disaster.
Adair revolutionized the science of snuffing and controlling wells spewing high-pressure jets of oil and gas, using explosives, water cannons, bulldozers, drilling mud and concrete.
He was the first to cap an underwater well and the first to cap a floating vessel. He led the industry in developing modern equipment and firefighting techniques, including the semi-submersible firefighting vessel.
His prowess inspired the title of the 1968 John Wayne movie based on his life, ``The Hellfighters.''
Adair's career began in 1938 at an Oklahoma oilfield where he was working as a roughneck for 30 cents an hour.
When a valve apparently blew, Adair said everyone else ran except him. ``I stayed up there and put the valve back on and almost got fired,'' he recalled.
Instead, he attracted the attention of Myron Kinley, then the dean of oil well firefighting. When Kinley retired in 1959, Adair started the Red Adair Co. Inc.
Three years later, Adair capped the ``Devil's Cigarette Lighter'' in the Sahara desert in 1962. The blowout shot flames so high that former astronaut John Glenn said he could see the blaze from his space capsule.
On his 76th birthday, Adair was working in Kuwait, attired in his trademark red overalls and swinging valves into place atop out-of-control wells.
He is survived by his wife of 64 years, Kemmie Adair; his son, James Paul Adair; his daughter, Robyn Adair; three grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
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