WORLD’S BIGGEST FIRE

Evening Star, Issue 23136, 9 December 1938, Page 2

WORLD’S BIGGEST FIRE

ATTEMPTS TO STOP IT AN UNDERGROUND INFERNO Careful and systematically, engineers and miners are closing the dampers of the world’s largest fire, a conflagration that has smouldered for 54 years beneath some of the richest hills of Southern Ohio, states a writer in a scientific journal. The fire-fighters may know in a year or two whether their efforts have been successful, or it may not be known for another half-century.

In an area covering 24 square miles, roughly a rectangle running six miles east and west and four miles north and south, a visitor can, in a few hours, obtain a fairly complete picture of what the domain of Satan must be like. From the summits and slopes of beautiful wooded ridges,' hundreds of columns of steam and smoko shoot up into the air, and many of them are hundreds of feet high. Steaming cracks, some no wider than a pencil, and others too wide to jump across, and fiery craters big enough to drive a car into, make the ground a treacherous place on which to walk. Steam and hot gases that sear the skin belch from many of the craters, and the acrid smell of sulphurous gases is everywhere. This underground inferno is caused by the burning of valuable coal deposits. Started over half a century ago during a strike of mine workers, the fire has destroyed an estimated £10,000,000 worth of coal. But now, after a number of private companies have spent fortunes trying to put the fire out, and after a great many people have become convinced that nothing can be done to stop it, its end is in sight. Under direction of a veteran minefire fighter, about 340 men, mostly unemployed miners, have been building barriers that will prevent the spread of the fire to the rich coal fields. If left alone, the fire eventually will burn itself out inside the harriers.

However, it is believed that the fire can be extinguished within three years, and at a cost of less than £200,000, by stopping up all holes and cracks in the earth through which air reaches tho burning coal, and erecting harriers of earth-filled gaps in the coal veins. The underground fire has produced a great many odd happenings. A woman living in a house near the spot where one harrier stands, went into her collar one day to get something. She struck a mate!), but it went out. She tried another, and it refused to burn. Later she found it impossible to keep a fire burning in her stove, or her oil lamp going. She was advised to move out at once, because her house was being gradually filled with gases from the underground fire.