1. In connection with the development of the oil and gas deposits of Western Siberia, particular importance is attached to the question of protecting the drilling and extracting operations against fire hazards and to the question of rapidly extinguishing fires involving runaway wells. At the present there are two principal ways of extinguishing well fires: by means of powerful water jets directed at the base of the flame or by means of a gas-water jet created by an aircraft turbojet engine [1]. The use of these methods requires a great deal of manpower and special technology, large stocks of water and much preparation. Bringing the firefighting crews and their equipment to the scene of the fire under the conditions prevailing in Western Siberia, where aircraft are the principal means of transport, is an expensive proposition. Moreover, much time is lost in setting up the equipment. In some cases the weather conditions may impede the use of the existing methods of fighting well fires. The chief advantage of recently developed efficient methods of fighting well fires is their simplicity, speed and economy. These methods rely on the use of an explosive charge to create a vortex ring that acts on the flame as it travels along the axis of the gusher. The development of these techniques is the practical outcome of experimental and theoretical research into turbulent vortex rings carried out in recent years at the Institute of Hydrodynamics, Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, at the initiative of Lavrent'ev [2]. This article offers a qualitative explanation of the vortex-ring flame quenching mechanism and presents the results of laboratory, proving ground and field tests of the new method. 2. When the jet of gas escaping from the mouth of a damaged well ignites, it burns in the diffusion regime. In the first approximation, the structure of the flame takes the form shown in Fig. 1. The chemical reaction takes place in a thin layer, which may be regarded as the surface where the fuel and oxidizer concentrations vanish, the diffusion flows to the surface being in stoichiometric proportion [3]. This surface is called the flame front. The front begins at a certain distance from the well mouth and is stabilized along a curve, the position of which is determined by the composition of the air-fuel mixture at the edge of the jet and by the condition of equality of the turbulent burning rate and the jet velocity. In the case of a turbulent flow, which obtains under actual field conditions, the above picture applies to the average flow and the average position of the front. In well fires the height of the flame may reach 80-100 m and the maximum flame diameter 10-15 m.