Foresters Fight Fires in Coal Refuse Piles

A fire burns day and night just down the road from Harry Wills’ home, a stubborn fire feeding on coal refuse that miners like Wills helped carve from the mountains years ago.

The smoke from this smoldering, five-acre pile of unwanted coal, about 20 miles southeast of Charleston, often drifts into the Willses’ yard and sometimes filters into their house.

“It’s just awful aggravating at times trying to breathe. Sometimes it gets in the house when the weather’s damp,” said Wills, 69, who suffers from black lung disease and heart problems.

“If we had an air inversion in this valley,” said Bill Gillespie, director of the state Division of Forestry, “the pollution would get so bad there’s no way people could stay here.”

Officials say West Virginia has more than 60 similar coal refuse fires, some of which have been burning for nearly five years.

The coal fires often were started by forest fires, which were often sparked by coal fires, which often set forest fires.

“It’s a vicious cycle,” said Gillespie.

“We have a forest fire. It sets a (coal) pile on fire. It may smolder for years or burn,” Gillespie said, “and then we get a dry year and get a leaf fall and a fire, and it sets more fires because there are thousands of these (coal refuse piles) scattered through the woods.”

In extreme cases, coal refuse fires have spread to coal seams inside mountains. When that occurs, the fire “will burn right through the mountain,” Gillespie said.

Mother Nature can’t help, Gillespie said, because rainfall only cracks open the refuse piles more, stoking the fires with gusts of air. The fires will burn until the state can pay the $25-million cost of advanced technology needed to extinguish them, Gillespie said.

Until then, officials hope to break the cycle by stopping arson, the major cause of West Virginia’s forest fires and the primary cause of the fires that damaged 350,000 acres last November, Gillespie said.

Gillespie is using a $700,000 federal grant to hire special forest rangers in 14 southern West Virginia counties assigned exclusively to battle the fires.

The money also will be used to purchase rugged vehicles for volunteer fire departments, which have had trouble getting to remote forest blazes quickly, and for educational programs.

Damage estimates from November’s forest fires in West Virginia are $300 million and rising, said Pat Ebarb, a U.S. Department of Agriculture forestry official.

The fires not only ruin timber but destroy vegetation vital to soil and flood protection.

“The soil has dropped an inch to an inch and a quarter here since last November’s fires,” Gillespie said, pointing to an area off a highway.

“That’s 100 tons to an acre that’s washed away,” he said. “The normal average (loss) in a woods is 200 pounds per acre. When you lose more than three tons per acre, you harm the land.

“When you lose 100 tons, it takes about a century to reclaim the land and get it back to the condition where you started,” he said.

But coal pile fires have other disastrous effects--air and water pollution, among them. The fire near Wills’ home, for example, drops molten metals from the earth into a creek and leaves the water warm to the touch yards downstream, even in subfreezing temperatures.

Rep. Bob Wise (D-W.Va.), who recently toured the area, “has really stepped up” action on the issue, Gillespie said.

Wise said the first step to a solution is an extensive survey of West Virginia’s wooded back country. National Guard aircraft using infrared scanners may be used, he said.

Once the survey is complete, Wise said state officials will approach the federal Office of Surface Mining for help.

“I think it’s important to recognize that this is a very expensive proposition and I don’t know if you’re going to get all ($25 million),” Wise said. “Probably you might be able to get $2 million or $3 million initially.”