In other out-of-control-fuel-disaster news,
China’s Xinhua news agency reports
that Inner Mongolia plans to put out half of its ongoing coal-field fires—which cover 10 square miles—by 2012.
The fires have been burning since the 1960s, and they consume 20 million tons of coal per year, or 3 percent of Inner Mongolia’s output.
Coal fires are stubbornly hard to extinguish, as the
former residents of Centralia, Pa., learned
. The underground fire that caused the evacuation of that town has been burning since 1962.
According to Xinhua, Inner Mongolia is budgeting $29 million a year to fight the fires there.
