Underground Coal: Fire in the Mountain
Read Time:5 Minute, 26 Second
I was watching “Haunted Collector” when they were digging around a house which the owner claimed was haunted. They found an old detonator box in the attic (of all places) with Japanese Characters on it. At first they were not sure why it was there, until they did research. Apparently they were in coal mining country (I failed to catch the name of the town) and long ago, Japanese miners were mining the coal when an explosion set off an underground fire. The bodies are still down there and the fire is still burning.
According to the Office of Surface Mining (OSM), more than 100 fires were burning beneath nine states, most of them in Colorado, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Utah and West Virginia. But geologists say many fires go unreported, so that the actual number of them is nearer to 200, across 21 states.
In Pennsylvania, 45 fire zones are known, the most famous being the fire in the Centralia mine in the hard coal region of Columbia County, which has been burning since 1962.
The Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana contains some 800 billion tons of brown coal, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804 to 1806) reported fires there. Fires have been a natural occurrence in this area for about three million years and have shaped the landscape. For example, an area about 4,000 square kilometers in size is covered with coal clinker, some of it in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, where there is a spectacular view of fiery red coal clinker from Scoria Point.
The United States is not the only Country with long burning coal fires. Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Norway, New Zealand and South Africa all have coal fires still burning. Perhaps the longest burning coal fire is in Germany. In Dudweiler (Saarland) a coal seam fire ignited around 1668 and is still burning today. This so-called Burning Mountain (“Brennender Berg”) soon became a tourist attraction and was even visited by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Also well-known is the so-called Stinksteinwand (stinking stone wall) in Schwalbenthal on the eastern slope of the Hoher Meißner, where several seams caught fire centuries ago after lignite coal mining ceased; combustion gas continues to reach the surface today.
In China, the world’s largest coal producer with an annual output around 2.5 billion tons, coal fires are a serious problem. It has been estimated that some 10-200 million tons of coal uselessly burn annually, and that the same amount again is made inaccessible to mining. Coal fires extend over a belt across the entire north China, whereby over one hundred major fire areas are listed, each of which contains many individual fire zones. They are concentrated in the provinces of Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia.
It is not easy to put out a coal fire as evidenced in Centralia, Pennsylvania. The fire started in May 1962, when the Centralia Borough Council hired five members of the volunteer fire company to clean up the town landfill, located in an abandoned strip-mine pit next to the Odd Fellows Cemetery. This had been done prior to Memorial Day in previous years, when the landfill was in a different location. On May 27, 1962, the firefighters, as they had in the past, set the dump on fire and let it burn for some time. Unlike in previous years, however, the fire was not fully extinguished. An unsealed opening in the pit allowed the fire to enter the labyrinth of abandoned coal mines beneath Centralia. Numerous attempts were made to fight the fire to no avail. Finally, the U.S. Government stepped in and paid the residents to move out. In 2010, only 10 people still lived there. In 1986, the University of Pennsylvania Press wrote;
“This was a world where no human could live, hotter than the planet Mercury, its atmosphere as poisonous as Saturn’s. At the heart of the fire, temperatures easily exceeded 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Lethal clouds of carbon monoxide and other gases swirled through the rock chambers.”
China has partnered with Germany to develop new techniques to fight these type of fires. It has been said the fires in China contribute to air pollution and considerably increased levels of greenhouse gas emissions and have thereby become a problem which has gained international attention. China’s coal fires, make up as much as 1 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.
Extinguishing underground coal fires, which sometimes exceed temperatures of 1,000°F, is both highly dangerous and very expensive. Underground coal seam fires are customarily quenched by inertization through mine rescue personnel. Toward this end the affected area is isolated by dam constructions in the galleries. Then an inert gas, usually nitrogen, is introduced for a period of time, usually making use of available pipelines; if available.
The main problem with putting out these fires is the heat. Heat resistant materials need to be devised to order to put the fire out so that it stays out. Energy can be removed by cooling, usually by injecting large amounts of water. However, if any remaining dry coal absorbs water, the resulting heat of absorption can lead to re-ignition of a once-quenched fire as the area dries. So, material has to be developed to deny the affected area oxygen. Nitrogen has been used with limited success because once the fire is out, if the mine is not properly sealed off, the coal can spontaneously combust and we are back at square one.
Besides the impact coal mine fires have on the ecology, communities near these mines live in constant danger of mines catching on fire and the people running the mines being unable to put it out. Water only goes so far so new methods need to be found to extinguish these flames. Airports use foam to put out aircraft fires, but sometimes the fires are inaccessible using current fire fighting methods. Some success has been made with boring holes into the affected mine from above, and for the next 2 years constantly pumping mud, clay and water until the chamber is sealed and no oxygen can get inside. That doesn’t always work.
Until methods can be found to tackle this problem, the Fire in the Mountain will never go away.
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This is potentially dangerous to those folks who live in that area, and the countless areas not yet counted. It’s another example of man’s reckless disregard for the earth. One day we’re going to pay a big price indeed and that day’s coming.
Leslie/David thanks so much for your kind words. Gary is one of our newest authors and we hope he plans to stay with us for a long time.
Excellent. I’ve been thinking about writing about this for quite awhile but inertia got in the way. I doubt if anything I put down on paper could be as well executed as what you have produced. I don’t think most people are aware of how many underground fires from coal mines that are continuously burning and how they’ve impacted on the environment and the communities anywhere near them. Thank you for informing us and for relieving my guilt somewhat because I’ve been – well, just plain lazy.
Fascinating article. I knew something of the coal fires in Pennsylvania, but I never knew the rest. Thank you Gary – and Mad Mike’s for the education.