Coal Smoldering Being Smothered
|  Video
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| Andrew Keller |
| 5/7/2009 |
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| Glance around the Badlands, and the lush green scenery makes it tough to imagine 2,400 acres were up in flames last August. But just beneath the surface, there`s smoldering evidence. "There`s always a potential risk that these will reignite and start another grass fire," says the Public Service Commission`s Project Manager Tim Oswald. As the grass fire blazed through this stretch between Golva and Marmarth near the Little Missouri, it met hillsides with exposed, surface coal. "The exposed coal that was available to burn ignited as the fire front passed," says Jesse Olson of Dakota Prairie Grasslands, who`s involved, because the project is taking place on grassland property. And the coal has been burning ever since. The fire has slowly moved into the hillside, which will eventually collapse. The embers and sparks can then re-ignite a new grassland fire. Because of the danger, an Office of Surface Mining grant has allowed the Public Service Commission to work with the Dakota Prairie Grasslands to extinguish the threat. "We come out here and we identify the potential sites, and we`ll get a contractor out here and we`ll basically over-excavate the fire, take out the hot burning embers, until we get into the cold coal, then we`ll come back in and build a barrier wall between the burning coal and the non burning coal, and reclaim the site," says Oswald. The Public Service Commission deemed it important to come out and put the fire out, both for public safety and also to minimize the chance for other wildfires. "It`s kind of neat to see, as you look around you can see the red scoria on these hills, and a lot of that is from the process of coal burning," says Olson. Eleven burning-coal hillsides have been smothered so far. The Public Service Commission worked North of Medora in April and said they put out coal burns that were ignited 20 years ago, some maybe even longer. |
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