> > They never got it under control. It just burned itself out.
> > Howard
>
> You think that's bad? Coal mines under Centralia, Pennsylvania have been on fire since 1962.

I used to live in the coal fields in Eastern, Kentucky, and the mines there produced huge piles of "slate" mine waste. Slate, of course, is metamorphosed shale, and would not likely burn if there was not a fairly high coal content. But some of these piles burned for decades, before somebody figured out that the air pollution was not entirely caused buy coal burned to heat buildings and power trains.

To make matters worse, it was mostly high-sulphur coal. Some of the slate piles filled in valleys so that it was often over 100 feet deep and covered many acres.

The house we lived in there was built on filled land. Someone had dumped many dumptruck loads of slate into a "holler" and created a level lot. Anyway, our back yard caught fire and required a high pressure hose to wash away most of the slate until it stopped smoking. Our 35 ft. wide back yard was reduced to 10 ft. but the house was no longer threatened. We rented it, so it would not have been our loss, but we were very relieved anyway.
Howard