[HN Gopher] Pennsylvania town coal mine has been on fire since 1962
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Pennsylvania town coal mine has been on fire since 1962
Author : fireball_blaze
Score : 44 points
Date : 2021-02-07 19:30 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| alamortsubite wrote:
| I'll always remember Centralia fondly as the post-apocalyptic
| wasteland of my childhood. Before the state was forced to close
| off the section of Route 61 that later became known as the
| "Graffiti Highway," you were likely to encounter abrupt drops and
| ridges in the pavement as you drove through, the result of
| subsidence caused by the fires burning through the coal veins
| below. You were also treated to the sight of smoke wafting up
| from fissures in the ground, and sometimes even flames.
|
| I took my girlfriend for a visit 7 or 8 years ago. At that point
| the town had been almost completely razed. Without explanation to
| an uninitiated viewer, curbs and fire hydrants bizarrely poked
| out from a field of weeds that had grown over much of the town's
| streets, the houses behind them long bulldozed and abandoned. The
| strangest thing to me, though, was the juxtaposition of the
| newly-constructed Locust Ridge Wind Farm high on a neighboring
| mountain, its enormous windmills plainly visible from the rubble
| on the hill in town, all offering a stark and beautiful reminder
| that even after the apocalypse things can get better.
| markgall wrote:
| Not exactly news then, is it?
| tech-historian wrote:
| News != something being interesting
| arcticfox wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow, but is that questioning whether it's on-
| topic for HN? If so, worth a quick recheck of the guidelines.
|
| I personally found the wiki article interesting from beginning
| to end.
| sumthinprofound wrote:
| this is my first time hearing of it. only other thing similar
| I'm familiar with is the Springfield tire fire on The Simpsons,
| and I always thought that was hyperbole, until now.
| robbiep wrote:
| There's also this in Turkmenistan
|
| https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/api.nationalgeographic.com/d.
| ..
| handedness wrote:
| Non-AMP version for anyone who wants it:
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/07/1407
| 1...
| voisin wrote:
| Is t burning hot enough that the heat could be harnessed like
| geothermal energy?
| nelsonmandela wrote:
| I wonder what the effect on the plant life around it is like
| Doesn't seem like there is anything in the wikipedia about CO2
| ppm
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Compared to the damage done to the ground and surface water in
| that area due to mining, probably little-to-none. The fire is
| burning slowly, if indefinitely, and anthracite coal is
| relatively clean-burning.
| nelsonmandela wrote:
| I was thinking it would be beneficial to have an abundance of
| co2
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Gotcha. Given how ecologically screwed up that area is, it
| seems like it'd be tough to separate that effect. We can at
| least hope for a silver lining.
| xwdv wrote:
| Why not just put it out?
| qPM9l3XJrF wrote:
| Should be an easy way to reduce carbon emissions at least.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| If that's even possible, it would be extremely expensive to do
| so. To make things more complicated politically, the problem is
| very localized and the town has already been abandoned. But
| hopefully, at some point we'll have the technology to do this,
| because otherwise it's hard not to imagine the fire will
| continue to burn forever.
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| Presumably it's burning hot enough and with enough fuel that
| putting it out is difficult using conventional methods (ie
| cooling). You see a similar problem with field fires or battery
| fires. That being said, in this case, I'm surprised you
| couldn't say its supply of oxygen, unless I missed something in
| the article?
| Retric wrote:
| Depriving it of oxygen and cooling run into the same issue,
| namely after burning this long heat has penetrated deep into
| the surroundings. To the point where it likely takes years to
| cool off.
| quaffapint wrote:
| 20 years ago or so we would drive through the area and smell it.
| We went back there about 5 years ago and wandered around the
| graffiti highway with the family. It was an interesting
| experience. You just pulled along basically an old road and
| wandered around some abandoned graffiti'd up roads and woods. It
| didn't really smell like before.
|
| There were still homes on the edges, which I was surprised to
| see. Good to read the article to understand why they were still
| there. I imagine they're happy that the 'attraction' has been
| shut down.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| In the 80s and 90s many row homes in Centralia had ad hock
| supports keeping them standing upright- their next-door
| neighbors had already been evacuated and demolished due to
| subsidence from the fire depleting coal veins below. It was
| impressive. Besides the smoke and odor, on the outskirts of
| town you could sometimes see fire coming up out of the ground.
| m463 wrote:
| There are nuclear reactors that have been around a while too.
| Don't know if they've been going the entire 1.8 billion years
| though:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo
| mannykannot wrote:
| IIRC, this could not happen today, as the concentration of U235
| in natural uranium has decreased (by decay) to the point where
| there's not enough for a chain reaction to be sustained with
| any naturally-occurring moderator.
|
| _Some of the mined uranium was found to have a lower
| concentration of uranium-235 than expected, as if it had
| already been in a reactor. When geologists investigated they
| also found products typical of a reactor. They concluded that
| the deposit had been in a reactor: a natural nuclear fission
| reactor, around 1.8 to 1.7 billion years BP - in the
| Paleoproterozoic Era during Precambrian times. At that time the
| natural uranium had a concentration of about 3% 235U, and could
| have reached criticality with natural water as neutron
| moderator allowed by the special geometry of the deposit._
|
| It sputtered on and off for hundreds of thousands of years:
|
| https://ans.org/pi/np/oklo/
| jennyyang wrote:
| What exactly is burning at this point? I would suspect there is
| little oxygen left down there. Is it some other form of chemical
| reaction? They can't just dump boatloads of water to douse the
| flames? There appears to be enough water for things like
| fracking, we can't do the same here?
| alamortsubite wrote:
| The scope of the problem is huge. Oxygen can enter from a
| highly elaborate network of abandoned mines and boreholes that
| stretch for miles, as well as any number of surface fissures.
| As far as the coal component, keep in mind that this region has
| the highest concentration of anthracite in the world.
| Hamuko wrote:
| If there's smoke coming out, wouldn't it mean that there's a
| route for oxygen to get in?
| jennyyang wrote:
| If that's the only route in, then no. Because most of that is
| expelled gasses due to heat, there's no way that oxygen could
| go in if the gasses and smoke were being driven out by the
| fire.
| riffraff wrote:
| See also Brennender Berg[0], which has been burning since 1662.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brennender_Berg
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(page generated 2021-02-07 23:02 UTC)