Underground fires

ghost town

[snowman]

[offroaders.com...]

[bcolflesh]

There's a good Italian restaurant right outside the main town, always stopped w/my Dad on the way through - weird to look out and see fires on the sides of the road and huge ash filled sinkholes.

[grelmar]

Never been to that one, but underground coal seam fires are a pretty common occurrance. Some basic Googling will find you dozens of ongoing coal seam fires. I remember a town not far from Williams Lake BC that had a coal mine fire that had been ongoing for 30 or 40 years, and they'd just moved the active part of the coal mine to a different part of the mountain, and kept track of the old fire so they would (hopefully) avoid tunneling into the fire.

And all this is taking place in the rockies, which meant that as the coal burns away, there is an increasing risk of a massive landslide as the mountain shifts to fill the hole.

This article:
[penweb.org...]

has a sidebar with 11 active underground fires in Pensylvania alone.

The oldest mine fire in the world is in england, and has been going for well over a century. Can't remember the name of it, but I remember seeing it in the Guinnes Book of Records once.