The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-11-27

mountain, honeycombed with veins of coal, the fire has gnawed and ad- vanced.
 The time came when the company was anxious to get at the vast quanti- ties of coal below the water level, but before the protecting flood can be drawn off the fire must be extinguish- ed. In his last annual report Lewis A. Riley, president of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, announced that efforts to this end were meeting with success.
 Modern mine firefghting methods are as much an improvement over those of fifty years ago as the modern mining methods over those of the ear Her periods in the coal industry. But still the engineers and frefghting ex- perts of the Schuylkil region faced a big problem when they were ordered by the coal company to extinguish the Greenwood blaze. A map of the first swept workings was first examined, and after much effort a plan was evolved. But the, accomplishment was to cost over $2,000,0O0 and take more than two years. Work was started in the latter part of 1906, and is advanc- ing steadily at the present time.
 Instead of pouring water alone up- on the flames mixture of water and coal dust or culm, has been used. It has been found that this, in a certain degree of consistency, washed into the W0rlziopc ic +ba ,oooct ofFaoti,,a orey4 that has ever been used in extinguish- ing fire The blaze is in the pillars of coal at the sides of the workings, and the wet culm smothers it wherever il touches the fire. A working is filled, and the wet culm not only cuts off all air from the fire but dries and be- comes solid, forming almost as good a support for the roof as the coal that was originally there. Inch by inch the fire has been smothered, burned out working closed and a new support for the roof formed.
 At the Greenwood this plan has been followed by the engineers on a huge scale. Scores of six-inch bore holes were driven through the noun 
 These allowed the gases to escape and carried the culm water into the work ings. At the edge of the SchuylSil river large boiler house with foul 100-horsepower boilers was built, and these ran two pumps, each with ca paeity of 12,000 gallons of water { minute. These pumps sent through ten-inch piping, to the mountain top distance of 16.O00 feet, some thre, | millions gallons of water each day. At the top of the mountain the wa ter was turned into big troughs ant | into these was also emptied the culn 1 brought by the trainload from the bis culm banks at Hauto, two miles away l The mixture was then poured contin l ualIy down the bore holes and gainet 1 foot by foot upon the fire. In a fev months the engineers calculate tha 1 the mine will be reclaimed. In the tw years of flushing with the average O three million gallons of water dail poured upon the fire, the working
 will have been flooded with an i'm
 mense volume of water in excess o two billion gallons, with which wer mixed thousands of gallons of culm. I As quickly as 1t became apparen
 that the culm poured into a bore hol
 had reached all the fire than it coult
 a new bore hole was driven nearby The chutes were movable and the pro Icess was repeated. This was done lover and over again. There was n
 outward sign of the fire except the ga
 or steam escaping from the bor