China: Coalmine Fire Put Out After Half a Century
February 8th, 2008The is the most incredible thing I’ve read since the one about the massive plastic trash tip in the Pacific Ocean.
Via: Times Online:
After a three-year effort and untold quantities of water, Chinese firefighters have extinguished a fire that had been burning underground in a coalmine for more than 50 years.
The blaze had consumed as much as 12.5 million tonnes of coal as it raged unchecked beneath the surface and spewed out more than 70,000 tonnes of toxic gases annually since the 1950s.
Firefighters finally beat the fire by boring into the coal seam and flooding it with water and slurry. They then capped the mine shafts to starve the flames of oxygen. As well as staving off further environmental damage, they have saved more than 651 million tonnes of coal, which will be mined to fuel the Chinese economic and industrial juggernaut.
Miao Pu, head of the firefighting team at the Terak mine in Xinjiang, a sparsely populated, mainly Muslim region in northwestern China that is rich in resources, said: “First, we drilled into the burning coal bed and then poured water and slurry into it to lower the temperature. After the temperature dropped we covered the surface to starve the fire of oxygen.” Officials plan to monitor the coal seam for several years in case the fire reignites.
The smouldering furnace 100 metres (330ft) underground at the second-largest coalfield in Xinjiang had released more than 70,000 tonnes of toxic gases annually since the 1950s. Two years ago firefighters in the area put out a similar fire that had been burning for more than 50 years, but there is much more to do.
Thousands of underground coalmine fires are believed to cover an area of 720sq km (280sq miles) in China. They consume as much as 20 million tonnes of high-quality coal and another 200 million tonnes of coal storage each year.
Damage to the environment is as troubling as the economic losses. Scientists believe that the underground fires may produce as much carbon dioxide as about 1 per cent of the total burnt as fossil fuels, although estimates vary.
Some scientists say that the fires could release as much as 360 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — as much as all the cars and light lorries in the United States.
The fires, often smouldering in coal seams on or just below the surface, have shaped the landscape of coal-rich regions in China for millenniums. The layers of coal can go on for miles underground, with fuel to burn for decades or centuries.
Special Thanks: Idleworm
I learned recently that Pennsylvania has the distinction of being home to the largest number of underground coal fires in the United States. And further, that some of these fires have been burning continuously for upwards of 40 years; that they’ve obliterated entire towns; that they vent an unimaginable amount of carbon dioxide and other gases into the already overburdened atmosphere; and that, for the most part, very little is being done about them. All these facts astonish and disturb me, but none more than the very possibility of the fires’ existence. How can a fire rage underground for decades? The answer: very easily.
http://itotd.com/articles/346/pennsylvania-coal-fires/
It’s not just china
I live in Pennsylvania, and there is a town south of Scranton-Wilkes Barre that has been on fire for ages. Driving through it, you don’t see any flames shooting out anywhere, but there is a constant plume of smoke hanging over the town. It brings in some tourist bucks for the area, but I suspect the reason the fire was never put out is the local town or township council could never agree to issue a permit for some outside firm to come put it out. That is how things work in Pennsylvania. Getting a permit to put a garden shed on your property can be an ordeal.