Born on the family farm in Montgomery County, Texas in 1889, Pat was a young man of 22 a century ago. His dad was a real estate man and his mom a housewife. He and his two brothers and three sisters probably attended the Willis Male and Female College, a semi-private boarding school for students of all ages. Theirs was an uncomplicated small-town life.
By 1920, Pat had married a local girl and followed his father into the real estate business. He fathered two boys and soon found an opportunity to become proprietor of a lumber mill in the area. That was a fateful change of pace for the 30-year old, because he was on company business in Old London, Texas (Rusk County) one day in 1929, when he stopped to join spectators who were watching an oil field fire.
After eighteen days of fierce battle, in which three firefighters had been killed, the flames were just as intense as ever, and the local folks were ready to give up. Young Pat Patton stepped up to the owner of the burning well and said “I can put that fire out”. The owner looked at him as though he were crazy.
“I’ve thought of a way” said Patton stubbornly. “I know I can do it!” Since the owner had nothing to lose, he granted permission. For 19 hours Patton worked to build special equipment, right on the spot. Then he called for volunteers and moved forward to face the inferno. An hour later Patton and his crew had put out “a belching volcano” which had terrorized Texas oilmen for days.
On the impulse of the moment, Patton had launched himself into a new career. He became one of the greatest oil well firefighters in the world. He made a personal fortune in one of the toughest businesses any man ever entered. Well into his fifties, he was still boasting “there isn’t any oil fire goin’ that I can’t cap”.
The secret to his success lay in his approach. Instead of flooding the flames with water, buying them in sand or snuffing them with nitroglycerin, he devised machinery that would divert flames away from the casing area, so his crew could then get close enough to remove the debris and cap the well by pumping mud directly into it. He called these inventions his Seating Tool and Fire-Pan Shield.
Tragedy struck Patton and his family in 1938. He and his crew (which included his brother Will and his son Otis) were fighting the Texas Company’s No. B-2 gasser in Vermilion Bay, about 30 miles south of New Iberia, Louisiana. They had dug a trench into the floor of a 60’ crater of hot mud that had been formed by previous unsuccessful attempts. After 16 days, working in two hour shifts while assistants kept playing streams of water around them, they got within a few feet of the casing.
Next, they had to fit the Seating Tool into place, but flames continued to belch from cracks in the casing. They reinforced a small boat against the heat and took it into the inferno, but the heat cracked the hull of the boat and it capsized at the edge of the crater. Week after week, they kept struggling. On June 12, 1938, shortly after the well had finally been capped, the manifold blew from the casing head and struck Will Patton and Edward Richardson, throwing them into seven feet of water. Pat plunged in after them, reaching for his brother, and a piece of heavy equipment fell on his arm, mangling it so badly it had to be amputated. Will Patton and Ed Richardson were both killed.
Patton, now a 50-year-old one-armed firefighter, never slowed down. He continued to fight oil well fires until the early 1950s, developing asbestos suits and goggles for his men, and shouting orders to the crew at every turn. In the 1960s he was instrumental in developing Patton Village, a two-square-mile community in eastern Montgomery County, not too far from where fires of a different nature are raging in 2011.
Shortly after his 100th birthday, in 1989, Hugh Lee “Pat” Patton passed away. He will be remembered as a man of courage, vision and persistence.
References:
- Lader, Lawrence, “Hero of the Oil-Well Fires”, Coronet Magazine, December 1946
- “Oil Fire Fighter Killed, One Missing, One Mangled”, Albuquerque Journal, June 12, 1938.
- Sloane, Story III, “Wells Gone Wild”, Houston Lifestyles & Homes, November 2007
- McKay, Paul, “H.L. Patton, founder of Village, dies at 100”, Houston Chronicle, February 22, 1989.
Marie Brannon - Experienced writer Marie Brannon hails from Texas. She is a detail-oriented writer who approaches article research with meticulous care.
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