Did you know there’s a fire in Australia that’s been burning for thousands of years?
It sounds like a horror film but it's real.
Hey guys Julia here for DNews
If you’ve ever played Silent Hill you know how eerie that town is.
A few streets are all the remains from a once booming town.
No people.
Just emptiness.
And toxic smoke.
What if I told you that town is REAL.
Well in way.
The town Centralia Pennsylvania once boasted a booming population of over 1200 people.
Now empty lots and cracked pavement sit on top of a giant burning pit of fire.
Seriously.
A fire has been burning underground since May of 1962.
It all started when a bit of garbage in a nearby landfill started smoldering.
Since the landfill was built on top of an old coal mine, it was only a matter of time
before the fire reached the coal.
Some 50 odd years later and numerous attempts to put it out, the fire now stretches nearly
400 acres.
It smolders just below the surface, occasionally releasing toxic gases into the air, such as
carbon monoxide.
In fact it’s those gases that caused people to leave the town.
Some residents started passing out in their basements and soon town officials couldn’t
deny it anymore, the area wasn’t safe.
So most residents left and the town is declared “condemned”.
Now tourists and fans of Silent Hill flock to the town to check out the sights.
Or smells.
Our AP Julia was one of those tourists back in 2009.
She described it as “like hell on earth”.
While Centralia certainly is the most famous, it’s not the largest or the oldest underground
fire.
Coal fires can occur naturally too, from lightning strikes or even from spontaneous combustion.
Yeah.
Coal can spontaneously burn, it’s just it’s natural reaction when it interacts with oxygen.
Even at temperatures as low as 104 degrees.
Whatever sets the the spark, it doesn’t take long for a seam to catch fire.
And even though it might be underground, oxygen rich air reaches the coal in the small spaces
between rocks and soil fanning the flames.
And then burns for centuries.
Here in the states, the oldest coal fire lies outside of the smalltown of Glenwood Springs
Colorado.
The South Cañon Number 1 Coal Mine fire has been burning since 1910 maybe even since 1899.
But it’s by no means a novelty in the area.
The surrounding mountains are littered with underground coal fires.
It’s so common place, there’s a park called “Burning Mountain” and nearby towns even
host a “burning mountain festival”.
But even those aren’t the most dangerous.
That honor goes to an underground fire outside of St. Louis, Missouri.
Well it’s more of smolder.
This heat doesn’t have any actual flames yet.
According to a St. Louis Country report, it’s called a “sub-surface smoldering event”.
It only started in 2010, but already it’s putting thousands of residents at risk.
Only 1200 feet away lies an old nuclear waste site!
So if the smolder reaches the waste, well it’s not good.
Most residents were unaware such a danger lurked in their neighborhood till a little
pamphlet showed up at their door like “hey guys…
here’s the emergency evacuation plan just in case this really bad thing happened or
as they call it a “"catastrophic event".
Basically it won’t go “boom” but it could create and release large amounts of
radioactive fallout into nearby areas.
But officials claim the landfill “is safe and intensively monitored."
The only thing at risk from the fire is your nose.
Apparently it smells horrible.
Those are just a few of the fires in the US, there’s dozens of fires in India and China.
It’s a surprisingly common problem.
A fire burning throughout a coal seam in China spreads for thousands of miles.
Or a fire in Jharia, India is reportedly 100 years old.
It started in 1916 and rages to this day.
But even that might not be the oldest one.
In Germany Brennender Berg, or burning mountain caught fire in 1688.
The oldest one might be in Australia also called…
Burning Mountain… okay wow these names are super original… and some estimates say this
fire hasn’t gone out in 5,500 years!
There’s literally hundreds of thousands of these coal seam fires burning all over
the world right this very minute.
But if you’re wondering yeah, there is an environmental cost.
All these fires send millions of tons of CO2, a greenhouse gas, pouring into our atmosphere.
But the problem with all these fires…
well there’s a reason many have been burning for so long.
They’re notoriously hard to put out.
Some experts think the only solution is a backhoe, digging them out.
But others worry exposing the fires to air might make them worse.
In Centralia they spent over 5 million dollars trying to find a solution of smothering it
with concrete and soil.
So sometimes it’s just cheaper and easier to let it burn.
According to experts, Centralia could burn for another 250 years.
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So there’s loads of fires underground, but there's also water down there… a lot of
it.
Dr. Carin Bondar explains in this video how researchers discovered a whole ocean of water
near the core of the earth!