Flaming Dragon

[xoxoxoBruce]

From Smithsonian magazine;

IN CHINA, MORE THAN 50 COAL FIRES FUEL POLLUTION-MAKING NIGHTMARE
Stretching across a barren area of nearly 15 square miles, Inner Mongolia's Wuda coal field is one of China's largest. Aboveground, orange dump trucks bounce over rutted dirt tracks between open pits, trailed by donkey carts whose drivers shovel up spilled chunks of coal. Faces smeared black look out, minstrel-like, from straw-and-mud huts. The land is bleached of life; even a statue of Chairman Mao looks pallid, flaking in the lashing wind.

Below ground, Wuda burns. "This is China's most dangerous fire zone," says Sun Guiliang, the Wuda coal company official in charge of underground blazes. He kneels beside a crack in the sandy earth. Suddenly, he disappears, shrouded by sulfuric smoke. Sun's detached voice rises to compete with a gust. "Currently," he yells, "this is also China's most destructive coal fire." Which puts Wuda in the running for the unenviable crown of World's Worst Ecological Disaster. Of China's estimated 56 active coal conflagrations, 16 burn below ground here.

"An underground coal fire is like a dragon," says Huang Wenhui, a coal fire expert at the China University of Geosciences. The dragon is slow, advancing perhaps 100 feet per year, but hard to reach, nonetheless: the average burning depth at Wuda is 110 feet, reaching down as far as 250 feet. "We can sense the dragon's tail, that is, the area already burned," Huang continues. "But satellite images show the hottest, densest blaze far below the surface, or the dragon's head. We can predict its path, and prepare to chop off its head."

The motivation to do battle? Cutting the enormous economic and environmental losses the fires pose to the world's largest coal producer. China mines nearly two billion tons of coal annually, or more than a ton per Chinese citizen. "China has one of the richest anthracite reservoirs in the world, stretching up to 125 feet deep across a 3,000 mile-long belt," says Anupma Prakash, a geologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. For all the talk of China's growing thirst for oil, coal fuels 75 percent of energy demand. Underground fires, some four decades old, render one-fifth of Wuda's fields inaccessible. China, the world's second-largest coal exporter, may lose more coal to fire than it sells. BiIlions of dollars going up in smoke.

Earth's atmosphere pays the cost: "China has the most severe coal fires worldwide - both in number and scale," says Stefan Voigt, co-chair of the Sino-German Coal Fire Initiative, which maps the fires from space. "The problem is scale. China's coal fires burn 20 million to 30 million tons of coal annually, pumping tons of ash into the air. A ton of ash results in a bit more than the equivalent in carbon dioxide, and a third of a ton of methane. Compared with carbon dioxide, methane produces 21 times the amount of greenhouse gas emissions."

In Wuhai, a city of 400,000 near the Wuda coal field, hazy air holds five times the standard amount of carbon monoxide and double the amount of sulfur compounds, according to the local environmental protection agency. "Sour rain," as China dubs acid rain, pockmarks buildings' concrete facades. A nearly eight-square-mile sinkhole reportedly has begun swallowing the foundations of schools, hospitals and houses.

Wuhai started as a company town, formed in 1951; many of Wuda's current 2,150 employees are children of the city's founders. China's economic boom has not ignited here; a Wuda worker's average annual salary is $1,000. All resources, including water, money and manpower, are at a premium.

While satellite images help locate fires, extinguishing them is another matter. Geologist Paul van Dijk of the International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) in the Netherlands estimates that less than 10 percent of China's fires are being fought. "There is no economic incentive to fight if the fire is not close to infrastructure or where a large number of people are living," he says. "Chinese often say something is not a problem if it is not 'in our eyes,' if we can't see it," laments Huang.

There have been successes; in 2003, a century-old fire was extinguished outside metropolitan Urumqi after a four-year "war of life and death between soldier-workers with the fire demon," according to the Chinese press. Still, among Xinjiang Province's 88 coal production zones, 24 remain in flames.

As Sun stands beside a crack seething with smoke explaining smothering, a strategy to suffocate Wuda coal field fires that requires a long, expensive process of sealing the blaze from oxygen-he hears a noise and walks to the lip of the pit. Two blackened faces stare up at him, the gleaners' hands filled with just-extracted coal. "Get away from here!" Sun shouts. "Can't you see there's a fire?"

The problem in Centrailia, PA doesn't make a pimple on the flaming dragons ass. Much of that ash(and other bad stuff) is drifting over the artic and northern Asia/Europe which isn't a Chinese problem, is it.