Rig 20

A BAFTA award nominated documentary looking at how Myron Kinley and his team extinguished an out of control oil installation fire at Naft Safidi in Iran in 1951 that had been burning for 26 days.

When a gas well explodes sending a jet of flames hundreds of feet high and generating an enormous heat it falls to American expert Myron Kinley to travel 3000 miles to Persia to extinguish it. What we see now demonstrates just how perilous the lives of these engineers was back in 1951. The fire had already been burning for twenty six days by the time they had installed miles of pipes to the river to pump millions of gallons of water to the site to cool it all down. Constructing shields out of corrugated iron covered with asbestos sheeting, they must first clear a path to the well end, then detonate explosions to clear the wreckage then starve the flame of oxygen before they can re-cap it and bring everything back under control. The single camera photography manages to capture a fair degree of the danger and give us a sense of the heat and danger in which these innovative technicians thrived. It's all actuality - with the odd diagram - and is quite an interesting watch.