"Winston" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:

(...)

Did you see the town of Centralia? I used to play Little League ball
against
their team, when I lived in Bloomsburg. Nice town. Now is has, I think, 5
residents. The seam under it has been burning since 1962. Heating a house
there must be cheap.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire

Oh, I forgot about Laurel Run, Pa. They had a fire but they were able to put
it out. But they had to move the town afterwards. g

That's another nice town. I raced there in the Giant's Despair Hillclimb a
couple of years, back in the '60s.

Those anthracite mining towns look different from the bituminous mining
towns in western Pa and WVa. Bituminous mining seems to leave a film of coal
dust over the whole town, and they look dingy. I remember Centralia, before
the fire started (1962) as a clean, bright little town.

When I first moved into the town I live in now, 33 years ago, the main coal
railroad out of the anthracite region was across the street and down a hill
from my house. A train would come through every few nights -- 100+ cars
heaped with anthracite. Man, those were heavy cars. The trains were going
maybe 15 mph but my whole end of town would shake. (The old right-of-way is
now a park.) The whole line, from its beginning in Pa to the docks about 5
miles away, supposedly ran downhill. They couldn't pull those coal cars
uphill.

anthracite anecdotes off

--
Ed Huntress



It seems unlikely that all the oxygen necessary to support that
level of combustion comes from 'ventilation' to atmosphere.

If so, I'd expect the intensity of the fire to 'bank and flare' at
some frequency as the level of oxygen changes with time, predicated
on the pneumatic resonant frequency of the cavity.

I wonder if the most persistent seam fires are enabled by chemical
oxidisers already in place?

--Winston