http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/firehole.html[font face=Serif][font size=3]…
Across the globe, thousands of coal fires are burning. Nearly impossible to reach and extinguish once they get started, the underground blazes threaten towns and roads, poison the air and soil and, some say, worsen global warming. The menace is growing: mines open coal beds to oxygen; human-induced fires or spontaneous combustion provides the spark. The United States, with the world’s largest coal reserves, harbors hundreds of blazes from Alaska to Alabama. Pennsylvania, the worst-afflicted state, has at least 38—an insignificant number compared with China (see sidebar, “Flaming Dragon,” p. 58) and India, where poverty, old unregulated mining practices and runaway development have created waves of Centralias. “It’s a worldwide catastrophe,” says geologist Anupma Prakash of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
…
China has the most coal fires, but India, where largescale mining began more than a century ago, accounts for the world’s greatest concentration of them. Rising surface temperatures, and toxic byproducts in groundwater and soil, have turned the densely populated Raniganj, Singareni and Jharia coal fields into vast wastelands. Subsidence has forced relocations of villages and roads—then re-relocations, as fire fronts advance. Rail lines give way; buildings disappear. In 1995, a Jharia riverbank was undermined by fire and crumbled; water rushed into underground mines, killing 78. Perhaps the most terrifying spectacle is the unquenched fire itself: many blazes smoldered quietly in old underground tunnels until recently, when modern strip pits exposed them to air. The revitalized flames erupted, engulfing the region in a haze of soot, carbon monoxide and compounds of sulfur and nitrogen. Burning coal also releases arsenic, fluorine and selenium. (Studies in China have suggested that the millions of people who use coal for cooking are being slowly poisoned by such elements.) Even so, workers continue to labor in this highly toxic environment.
…
Mining is not the only human intensifier of the fires. In Indonesia, huge tracts of land once covered by rain forest— and underlain by near-surface coal—is fast being logged, then cleared for agriculture. The preferred method: fire. The practice has ignited perhaps 3,000 coal fires since 1982, destroying houses, schools and mosques. Heavy smoke carpets much of Southeast Asia, blocking out sunlight and causing crop failures as well as reducing visibility and, in at least one case, triggering an oil-tanker collision. The smoke is also implicated in an epidemic of asthma. On a smaller scale, a related phenomenon has occurred in the United States; near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, for example, an old coal mine has burned for the past 100 years. In the summer of 2002, the blaze ignited a forest fire that consumed 12,000 acres and 43 buildings. Putting it out cost $6.5 million. And the mine still burns.
…
Some residents of nearby towns, such as Mount Carmel (pop. 6,389), fear the fire will reach them, but experts believe it will run out of fuel or hit groundwater before it does. Afew miles southwest of Centralia, two separate fires burn deep under mine waste near the village of Locust Gap. So far, the blazes seem confined to about a dozen acres, and it is hard to find surface evidence of them. Gary Greenfield, a geologist who works with Jones, says he doesn’t think either of them will reach any houses, but he admits that predicting underground fire paths is like predicting the weather. “I don’t think Locust Gap will become another Centralia,” he says. “At least not right away.” To the east, a fire has burned for at least 25 years near Shenandoah, opening fissures and emitting fumes, but so far causing no damage in the town itself.
…[/font][/font]
= new reply since forum marked as read
