05/04/2005
Fire Underground
Music is alive and well, at least in this part of the country. As a self appointed, completely unqualified music critic, I’ve written before about concerts of the New York Philharmonic and its guest performers at Lincoln Center. Of course, New York audiences are quite sophisticated, knowing for example, not to clap at the end of all but the final movement of a symphony. Last night’s audience in Avery Fisher Hall was not the typical audience but was much less inhibited and highly enthusiastic. They had every right to be enthusiastic about “America’s Youth in Concert”, a concert featuring selected instrumental and choral groups from high schools in the tri-state New York area.
At times, the joint was really rocking, every bit as much as when I attended a joint Philharmonic-Wynton Marsalis’ Jazz concert. The big attraction for us was our granddaughter appearing with her high school’s “Select Choir” in softer numbers, but finishing with a rousing “When the Saints Go Marching In” accompanied by a four-piece jazz combo. Overall, my wife and I were amazed at the talent of these young musicians. There was a veritable plethora of good music. Therein lies my only criticism. By the time our granddaughter’s choral group finished their numbers, three hours had passed since the beginning of the concert and the program indicated five more choral groups would follow! Old Bortrum had to leave, not wanting to fall asleep while driving home.
Let’s turn now to a state bordering our New York tri-state region, Pennsylvania. I’m not sure whether the dozen residents of Centralia, Pennsylvania should also be classified as courageous, foolhardy or just plain stubborn. An article by Kevin Krajick, “Fire in the Hole”, in the May issue of Smithsonian, concerns a major problem afflicting Centralia and other areas all over the world. I believe that I’ve written about this problem before but the Smithsonian article brings the situation up to date and it fits right into the current worries about our sources of energy and global warming. The problem is coal on fire.
Many millions of years ago, Pennsylvania was covered with large areas of swampy vegetation. The vegetation died and decayed, forming peat. (In fact, the so-called Carboniferous period, ranging from 360 to 286 million years ago, in North America is split into two periods, one being the Pennsylvanian.) As centuries passed, sediments covered the peat, not only putting pressure on the peat but also raising its temperature. As a result, the peat was transformed into lignite, a low-grade form of coal.
Coal is a fascinating material. It doesn’t have a chemical formula but consists of carbon and various other elements and compounds, including water. In some areas, the sediments piled up higher, increasing the heat and pressure even more, causing the lignite to lose some of its water and other compounds. It became bituminous, or “soft” coal. However, in what is now eastern Pennsylvania, the heat and pressures built up even further. The soft coal lost more of the stuff other than carbon and the result was anthracite, “hard” coal. Hard coal is black with a metallic luster and is more than 90 percent carbon.
Eastern Pennsylvania became the source of most of the hard coal mined in the United States, while the western part of the state was loaded with the softer variety. Hard coal, being almost all carbon, burns cleanly with little smoke and pollution. Burning soft coal, on the other hand, gives off copious amounts of smoke and particulate matter; it is not clean burning. As a child in the 1930s and 40s living in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, one of my tasks was to shovel the hard coal into the furnace, which during the winter months was kept burning continuously night and day.
It was a shock when I went off to graduate school in Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania. Trains in those days carried a coal car in back of the locomotive and vast amounts of smoke were emitted from the locomotive’s smokestack. I assume soft coal was the fuel. It certainly was the fuel of choice for the homes in Pittsburgh, which in those days was known for its legendary dark days in which the sun would be blotted out in midday by the smoke and pollution.
At the University of Pittsburgh, I met my wife-to-be, who came from a small town some 40 miles from Pittsburgh. Coal mines underlie many homes in the area. Since those days back in the 1940s, coal has been replaced by oil and gas, the steel industry is gone and most mines in Pennsylvania were abandoned. Where mining continued, it was strip mining. Not entirely, however; witness the case of those Pennsylvania miners who were rescued not too long ago.
Getting back to Centralia, it too is a town overlying a honeycomb of mines, with their network of connecting tunnels and chambers. It started 43 years ago, possibly when burning of trash over an abandoned mine ignited a fire in the mines. This fire continues today and, unless some huge sum of money becomes available, a highly unlikely scenario, the fire will continue for over 200 more years before all the coal runs out. Centralia was the home of some 1,100 people until the 1980s, when the federal government funded an evacuation of the town. Today, except for the dozen stubborn residents who refuse to give up their homes, the town is an empty shell marked by smoking pits and fissures and streets running to nowhere. The ground is so warm in spots that tomatoes were harvested at Christmas!
Coal fires don’t get much press and you might think them a local problem. However, Pennsylvania has 38 coal fires going on and the U.S. has hundreds of fires ranging from Alabama to Alaska. The oldest known coal fire is the Burning Mountain fire in Australia – it’s been burning for 6,000 years! Let’s turn to China, which has one of the richest anthracite deposits in the world, covering a range of some 3,000 miles and depths up to 125 feet. China mines 2 billion tons of coal a year. That’s a ton for every person in China. We keep hearing about the demand for oil in China being one factor that keeps gas prices high here. However, coal supplies 75 percent of China’s present energy consumption.
China has more than 50, perhaps hundreds of coal fires and, like many things in China, some are on a grand scale. Estimates of the amount of coal burned in these fires range from 20 to 200 million tons every year. The burning coal emits carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and methane, a greenhouse gas that’s more detrimental to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. It’s estimated that the China fires may contribute 1 percent of the world’s total carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.
How do you fight these fires? Remember, they may be burning as deep as 100 to 300 feet underground. It seems like the only sure way is to dig them out and fill them over with soil. But digging can also open them up to more oxygen from the air and they only burn more rapidly. Furthermore, strip mining has opened up the coal to the surface and underground fires can burst up to the surface causing significant emissions not only of carbon monoxide but also sulfur and nitrogen compounds along with arsenic, fluorine and selenium – not a healthy mix!
I was surprised to read that in my birth state of Colorado a coal fire that had been burning for a hundred years broke through in 2002 and ignited a forest fire that burned 43 buildings and 12,000 acres. To put out the forest fire cost over 6 million dollars and the coal mine continues to burn!
Well, the world is burning underground and, sporadically, above ground, as when bombs go off in Iraq or Lebanon. Needless to say, we’re glad to see our Editor, Brian Trumbore, home safely from the latter!
Allen F. Bortrum
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