This Is What Happens When A Fire Gets Into A Coal Mine

This is what happens when a fire gets into a coal mine. The exposed coal face burns, just like coal should, and smoulders through the underground seam where it’s safely protected from any firefighting. For the power plant town of Morwell, two hours east of Melbourne, this all began with a bushfire on February 9. Police are chasing a suspected arsonist who lit a fire beside the Strzelecki Highway which then burned through a timber plantation and into the mine. From the start, firefighters and the mine operator knew it’d be a bitch to put out. A mine spokesperson told Mining Australia that it’d take at least two weeks to extinguish "You can drop a bucket of water over it,” he said. “And it looks like the fire is out but it will come back as a smouldering fire." Until they could figure out to do, the residents were told to stay inside while the local council started handing out face masks. As of today the fire’s still burning and around 25,000 masks have been distributed.

Driving to Morwell you can see it from way back. It appears as a hump of smoke on the horizon and then your eyes get itchy. Having said that, Morwell produces 25% of Melbourne’s power from brown coal so it’s always a bit like that. Hazelwood power station, for which the coal mine was built, was also named the least carbon efficient plant in thirty countries by WWF in 2005, but given that, the locals seemed pretty excited about the smoke.

“It’s bad” Says Tony Morgan who owns the local laundrette. “The only good thing is business. Everyone’s clothes end up stinking so I’m getting people washing day and night.” I look around and there’s definitely a lot of people washing. Some are wearing masks, some aren’t. “But you’ve actually come on a good day. You should have seen it yesterday”. Tony shows me foul, brown panoramas of the town from his phone. “It’s all about the wind. Some days I can’t even see across the street.”

Down the street at Noodle Paradise the owner Bill repeats the same thing. He too has a dozen smog photos, including the one above, taken from his front lawn. “It wakes me up,” he says. “I just wake up and I feel like there’s no air and I know it’s the smoke outside. We close the windows, the doors, nothing works.”

Bill seems particularly angry. “Just don’t know why it’s taken three weeks to put out.” He says. “The CFA say another week, another week, and in that time we’re just told to stay inside.” It’s the sort of indignation that makes A Current Affair just so current, but then it’s also sort of ignoring the facts. As mining safety expert Professor David Cliff explained to ABC radio “Unlike timber, coal when it gets hot has massive thermal mass which is very hard to extinguish. There are a number of places known as 'burning mountains' in Australia where there are old underground coal deposits and cracks to the surface with smoke issuing from them. It will burn and continue to burn and can be very difficult to put out because the access to it is very deep." In the interview, David points to Burning Mountain in NSW, which was lit up by a lightning strike about six thousand years ago. It will continue burn at a meter a year for the foreseeable future.

The mine is easy enough to find. It’s a drive out of town and a climb over a barbed fence and there it is. The place smells like a steam train in a pioneer village and the ground is warm to touch. Across the pit, fire trucks head up and down the tiers, spraying water as best they can. Along the top of the mine is a fire-break cleared by bulldozers. Beyond that is blackened scrub from the fires. Peering into the scrub I can see a number of fires still burning, or sort of.

There a several cracks in the earth, running parallel to the mine rim, and red inside. I climb in from the firebreak and realise that the cracks are exposed coal seam, burning under the ground.

It took a while to snap the perfect selfie. In this time my shoes started to melt and I suddenly realised that falling into a hellish crevasse of burning coal was very possible, so I left.

In the dark the burning mine glows and you get a more accurate idea of the thing.

I stood and watched for a while, impressed with the wind fanning the coal face. Like wind on water the embers glow and ripple, sometimes sending up sparks.

I went home and a headache kept me awake for the drive. It’s all the smoke and soot which gets in your eyes. A lot of people have left, and there have been panicky calls to evacuate. In the meantime, firefighters claim that “observational reports from ground and aircraft has indicated significant progress has been made.” Experts have been called in to review strategy and everyone seems confident the fire will be out within weeks. But for the moment, avoid Morwell. It’s just not a healthy town.

@morgansjulian