Reading this morning that wildfires break out in Montana from time to time when coal seam fires break onto the surface.
How do fires manage to burn underground? Seems like there wouldn’t be a lot of oxygen and there would be water.
So, how does a fire manage to burn in the coal?
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Because the burned out areas often provide the path for oxygen to get to the fire. And once a coal fire has followed the seam underground the ground around it is already hot. And to extinguish the fire the oxygen and the heat have to be removed.
And sometimes poorly planned human intervention provides sources of oxygen (drilling test bores to find and isolate the fire).
The Centrailia Fire is a good example of a fire that has broken through the surface a couple times, and every time it has broken through all of the waste gas is expelled and the oxygen is pulled in.
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