Popular Mechanics Well, that’s one way to do it.
BY KYLE MIZOKAMI JUN 8, 2020- A Russian oil company called in the army to fight an oil well fire it was unable to control.
- The Russian army sent a Rapira anti-tank gun and crew to shell the wellhead.
- An anti-aircraft gun isn’t the biggest weapon used to stop a fire. Think much bigger. Much, much bigger.
Russian troops called in to battle a Siberian oil well fire got the job done with an unusual firefighting tool: an anti-tank gun. The army troops were requested after the owners of an oil wellhead that had caught fire were unable to put out the blaze. The gun, designed to kill NATO tanks, successfully extinguished the fire.
The well, operated by the Irkutsk Oil Company in Russia’s Irkutsk region, caught fire on May 30. The company was unable to put the fire out on its own. Oil well fires are notoriously difficult to extinguish due to the constant stream of gushing flammable petroleum. In order to extinguish the fire firefighters must separate the fire from the petroleum, no easy feat considering the petroleum is shooting upward under pressure.
According to Reuters, the Russian Defence Ministry flew in a Rapira MT-12 anti-tank gun and crew to the oil well site. That in itself was no easy feat—the Siberian Times says the oil well was 1,000 kilometers from the city of Irkutsk and 100 kilometers from the nearest village.
The Rapira MT-12 is a towed anti-tank gun designed to destroy enemy tanks. The MT-12 uses the same 100-millimeter gun as the older, obsolete T-55 main battle tank but with a longer barrel to increase projectile velocity. The gun crew fired repeatedly at the wellhead from a distance of 180 meters. According to the Defence Ministry, the gun destroyed the wellhead, breaking it from the well and allowing crews to seal the well.
Here’s video of the one-sided battle:
Despite the Russian government’s statement, it’s still not exactly clear what happened. The video shows the gun firing at the raging fire but not the moment the fire actually goes out. The Defence Ministry said the crew targeted the wellhead, but it’s not clear how destroying it would stop the fire. It’s also not clear why several shots would be necessary to destroy the wellhead, especially from point blank range, in an operation that apparently lasted from nighttime until dawn.
An alternate explanation is that the gun crew was instructed not to fire at the wellhead directly but just above it. Firefighters occasionally use explosive charges on particularly stubborn fires. The shockwave from the explosion separates the fire from its fuel source, the petroleum, instantly snuffing the fire out.
A high velocity anti-tank shell will leave a trailing shockwave in its wake, one that might be strong enough to momentarily displace the flames from the petroleum stream. It would probably take many shells to place one directly over the wellhead, especially since it was obscured by bright flames.
Whatever the case, using an anti-tank gun is not the craziest way to put out a fire. In September 1966, the Soviet Union used a nuclear bomb to extinguish a natural gas fire. The incident took place near Urta-Bulak in Uzbekistan, when a bomb with nearly twice the yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was detonated underground to seal off a natural gas fire that had raged for three years.
