August 30, 1986

The flagship enterprise of the wealthy Hunt brothers filed today in bankruptcy court for protection from its creditors, a victim of low oil prices. The Placid Oil Company, one of the largest privately owned oil companies in the nation, with 20,000 employees, filed the petition under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code. The action kept Placid's 23 lenders from moving ahead with imminent sales of oil and gas fields, land, stock and real estate. Such sales had been scheduled to begin today in Mississippi and on Tuesday in Texas. One of Largest Actions Under Chapter 11, a company is protected from its creditors while it attempts to reorganize. Today's filing, one of the largest Chapter 11 actions ever taken, means that next month information about the shrinking riches of the Hunt family is likely to be made public. Details of Placid's business condition must be filed then with the bankruptcy court in New Orleans, where today's filing took place.

The nation's trade deficit soared to a record $18 billion in July, with imports twice as large as exports for the first time ever, the Commerce Department reported today. Several economists expressed dismay at the figures, which defied expectations that a steady fall in the dollar's value would by now have started to reverse the trade flows. The deteriorating trade picture seemed certain to intensify sentiment in Congress for legislation to protect American industry and to become an issue in the fall elections. [ Page 31. ] Rumor Proves Incorrect The $18 billion deficit far exceeded the expectations of economists, most of whom had believed it would be in the range of $14 billion to $16 billion. A rumor circulating this week that the figure would be $16.1 billion, suggesting another leak from the Commerce Department, thus turned out to be incorrect. It was noted, however, that the deficit in merchandise trade rose 27 percent, to precisely that amount.

''My father never really cared about money,'' Bunker Hunt once said about H. L. Hunt, the billionaire Dallas oilman. ''It was just sort of how they kept the score.'' The Hunts' phenomenal riches were more than a personal scorecard, however. For, as much as any one family, the Hunts have defined the swaggering, risk-taking, entrepreneurial ethos of the oil patch. And just as H. L. Hunt's rise from poverty was the fulfillment of this region's most grandiose promise, its darkest days are now symbolized in the bankruptcy filing by the Hunts' Placid Oil Company. Like his sons, H. L. Hunt faced ruin more than once and rebounded. And his heirs still have extraordinary resources at their disposal. Even so, ''this is the most monumental financial reversal in modern American business history,'' said Harry Hurt 3d, author of ''Texas Rich,'' a 1981 biography of the Hunt family. ''It's also the collapse of Texas's greatest and most mythic family. The fact that the Hunts have declared bankruptcy is to Texas the equivalent of the Rockefeller family declaring bankruptcy in New York.''

There is an old Cameroonian saying that goes, ''The infant and the old woman go back.'' What it means is that the very young and the very old are expected to die - to go back -but not those in between. It is the death of those in between that requires an explanation. What has made the more than 1,500 deaths from the volcanic gas eruption last week difficult for many Cameroonians to grasp, said Philip Nos, an American missionary who has lived in Cameroon on and off since 1948, is that it was inexplicable: a cloud of gas emerging from a boiling volcanic lake wafting into villages in the dark of night and striking down whole families, or sparing one person and killing his wife a few yards away.

A Soviet military official said today that Moscow had learned through seismic means and satellite intelligence of three unannounced American underground nuclear tests. The official, Col. Vitaly L. Kotyuzhansky of the Soviet Defense Ministry, said the three American tests were of low yield. He specified when the tests took place and said Moscow's ability to detect the explosions showed that verification of a testing moratorium was not as difficult as Reagan Administration officials have suggested. Administration officials confirmed that the tests had taken place.