China’s official Xinhua news agency reports that a fire that broke out 130 years ago at a Chinese coalfield has finally been extinguished, stopping 100,000 tons of harmful gases – including carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide – and 40,000 tons of ash from polluting the atmosphere every year.
In the last four years, firefighters have spent $12 million to put out the flames at the Liuhuanggou coal mine, near Urumqi in Xinjiang province.
While ablaze, the fire burned up an estimated 1.8 million tons of coal every year since the fire first broke out in 1874.
Hou Xuecheng, head of the Xinjiang Coalfield Firefighting Project Office, said the Liuhuanggou fire was the largest among eight major coalfield fire areas in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang accounts for 1.8 trillion tons, or 40.6%, of China’s total coal reserves.
The continuing blaze caused environmental damage to the region, but it was only one of hundreds of coal fires that are burning out of control around the world, pumping huge quantities of carbon dioxide and pollutants into the atmosphere.
The problem was described as a global catastrophe by researchers at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) annual meeting in Denver last year.
They said that putting out the fires in China alone would cut carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to the volume produced by all US automobiles in a year.
They are most severe in countries such as China, India, and Indonesia, although smaller fires are still burning in the United States, for example in Colorado and Pennsylvania.
