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58    ABBOT'S MONTHLY

  As soon as I was comfortably settled in a Tulsa hotel I telephoned Mr. Kinley's office.... No, he was not in, the young woman informed me. He had left and hour ago by airplane to blow out a fire in Texas. Oh, yes, he would be in tomorrow-unless there was another fire somewhere.
   Next morning I went down to Kinley's office, and fortune was with me. Sitting there in a carefully appointed busi-ness office was a serious-looking young man inmmaculately dressed in a gray business suit, tie to match and with a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. His face was ruddy; and he talked with a flat brogue that was a delightul blend of the language of the far west and of the oil fields. Noth-ing about him suggested the devil-may-care individual who has been pictured for years as the typical oil well shooter of the Southwest.
   A brief comparison of Mack Kinley with the accepted picture of the veteran shooter quickly explains why he has forged to the top if his strange profession, though only 33 years old. He has made oil well shooting and fire fighting a business and applied to it basic business principles, just as he would if he were a hardware merchant or a good insur-ance salesman.
   I asked Mr. Kinley to tell me something about his novel profession.
   "There really isn't much to tell," he replied seriously, which was a perfectly natural answer from an individual of his nature.
   "You must get a close call now and then, don't you?" I suggested.
   "Oh, no; there really is not much danger in this business. Not nearly so much as most people think. Especially, if you watch what you're doing. Of course, if you get care-less-but if you're careless you've got no bussiness handling any responsible job."
   "But there must be quite an element of danger all the time, because you work with dynamite so much," I per-sisted.
   "I don't use dynatime at all. I quit that several years ago. I use nitro-glycerin." He still spoke seriously.

[[right image]]
[[caption]]Millions going up in fire and smoke. For days this oil well pored fire hundred of feet into the air and made a starling sight for miles around. It was tamed by Kinley in Arkansas. [[/caption]]

[[left image]]
[[caption]] By night this blazing gas well in lower California lighted up the entire countryside.[[/caption]]

ANY person who ever saw a burning oil or gas well realizes the tremendous task confronting the man who attempts to extinguish it. One who has never seen the ap-palling sight may draw something of a picture of the task by imagining a raging stream of oil several inches in diameter shooting out of the ground and into the air 100 or 200 feet, spraying everything for a distance of several hundred feet around with highly combustible fluid; then picturing this powerful stream becoming suddenly enveloped by flames that burn the fluid as it roars from the hole and shoots liquid fire into the air and sprays the ground around with thousands of gallons of flames.
Water has no effect upon the blaze.
It is scorching hot a hundred yards around the cauldron. The well is out of control and the flow of oil cannot and the flow of oil cannot checked. Quickly the spot develops into a miniature hell.
   It is such an inferno that Mack Kinley an the other fire-eaters of the ol fields are called upon to go. It is such a blaze as this that these men are asked to snuff out, much as you would pinch out the feeble blaze of a tal-low candle. During his compara-tively brief career as the head of hif fire-fighting crew, Mack Kinley has blown out about 50 such

for JANUARY, 1931       59
balzes. He does not believe that there ever will be an oil or gas well fire that he cannot put out within 48 hours after arriving upon the site, it given a free hand and enough nitro-glycerin.
   "In order to understand how it is possible to blow out any oil or gas fire," Mr. Kinley explains, "you must of course know the principle of the thing. Neither oil nor gas can burn under-ground, because there must be a mixture of air in any substance be-fore there can be fire; and aire cannot go down into the well with a terrific force pushing the oil or gas out.
   "So, contrary to what a lot of folks think, a well does not burn below the surface of the ground. Sometimes the force of the stream of gas or oil is so strong that it drives the sub-stance two or three feet above the earth before enough air can mix with it to ignite. I've seen some burning gas well that spouted nearly ten feet into the air before igniting, so great was the pressure in the well. Te higher they are above the ground be-fore they start burning, the easier the are to blow out, as a rule.
   "You know how simple it is to ex-tinguish a match or a candle merely by blowing your breath creates a sort of detonation-disturbs the air to such a degree that it twists or cuts off the blaze from its source.
   "A charge of nitro-glycerin has the same effect upon the burning well that your breath has upon a little candle blaze. The terrific detonation from the explosion twists the air to such an extent that ir momentarily cuts off the blaze from the stream of oil or gas. For the merest fraction of a second the force of the explosion actually cuts in two the stream of fuel.
   "The cut must be below where the stream is burning. Thus the burning oil or gas flies into the air on its regular course, but there is a grap between the burning section and that which follows-a gap which the blaze does not cross. Thus in the twinkling of an eye the well is transformed from a miniature volcano to an ordinary gusher, providing of course the proper precautions have been taken in advance to prevent the falling oil catching on fire."

IT all sounds so easy when Mack Kinley tell it, that you question him for definite details. For in-stance, how near the seething volcano must he put the charge of nitro-gly-cerin in order to assure breaking the gao in the stream?
   "Oh, you must have the explosive pretty near the well, all right. Ordi-narily I try to get it within a foot of the stream. Of course sometimes I can't get quite so close."
   That does not seem so unusual until you see an oil well fire. Then you understand why there are not more fire-eaters in the oil world. At 100 yards from the blaze the specta-tor shields his face from the terrific heat. To get within 50 yards of the
______________________________
______________________________
     ALTRUISM
By SAMUEL ENDERS WARREN

Tremble,
Little Leaf!
You cannot hel your tree-now!
Let winds howl and growl,
Let the heavens frown
And rains rush down
Upon you

Its safety
Lies not in your self-enforced rigidity,
But
In your trembling
Gently;
In shaking off their frantic blows,
In adjusting yourself
To their many moods
Temporarily.

Although
You frown
And fly into a rage,
And try to snatch your tree away
Till storms assuage,
Realize
That yo have just time enough To brown and die
And fall (the tree still standing!)
And, in your fall, O Altruistic One,
Enrich
The waiting soil!
_______________________________
_______________________________

fire it is ofetn necessary to crawl.
Few venture closer, especially on a windy day, when a vagrant whiff of wind may engulf with fire everything within 50 to 60 yards of the well.
   But the men who blow out the fire drag a bundle of gelatinized nitro-gly-cerin weighing anywhere from 50 to 150 punds, to a spot within 12 inches of the stream.
   In order to wishtand the terrific heat the men dress from head to foot within thick asbestos suits. Such an outfit conceals the wearer in practi-cally an air-tight case (it is referred to quite often as a "coffin") and it is made entirely of asbestos save for a tiny slit in front of the wearer's eyes.
This is made of mica. Any other transparent material would quickly melt under the pressure of the heat.
The clumsy gloves, odd-looking shoes, the ill-fitting suit, the stiff hood which protects the head, present a grotesque figure not unlike a deep-sea diver about to go below. The outfit weighs 60 pounds.
   As the wearer of this strange suit approaches the fire a steady stream of water pours upon him. This helps to minimize the heat by partially cool-ing the air and earth where the fighter works; and it helps to cut the blaze in case the wind should suddenly ship around and envelop the man.
   "Preparation for the charge is the big thing in blowing out a fire," Mr. Kinley explains. "And every fire presents a different probem. You've got to ger on the ground and figure out your line of attack. No twwo jobs are exactly alike, and it is up to the fire-figther to work out the one best way of attacking.
   "Unless you get everything in shape, the oil likely will catch again after you put in out, and all your work is to do over again; and sometimes you don't know when you do have preparations complete!"
   He referred to a fire in a well spurting 65,000,000 cubic feet of gas a day in Creek County, Oklahoma.
This well "blew in" quite unexpect.edly and threw the drilling tools ouf the hole, filled the air with rocks, mud, water and gas, and warped the derrick and machinery. The explo-sion that accompanied the coming in of the well pulled a stell cable across the crown block on top of the derrick and a spark ignited the gas. Before workmen realized the well had "blown in" it was a seething mass of flames. The telephoned for Mack Kinley.
   Ordinarily a gas of fire ir more easily blown out than oil; but this one eas not ordinary. When a derrick and oter machinery and equipment crumbles under the terrific heat a heavy steel beam fell across the open-ing of the well in such a manner as to slit the flow. One stream went straight into the air, the oter shot off to one side, spraying the groun with fire. As the stream must be severed below the blaze in order to blow out the fire, it obviously is neces-sary to get the stream of gas to go
   (Continued on page 88)