Not far from Hazard, Kentucky, in the shadow of Lost Mountain, a woman named Ruth Mullins saw smoke rising off the slope. “I knew it wasn’t no woods on fire, because of the smell”—the rotten-egg stench of sulfur—she said. Her suspicions were soon confirmed: Lost Mountain’s coal mine, abandoned for 40 years, was burning.
Kentucky names coal fires for the people who first report them, so the fire, which has continued to smolder and occasionally flame since it was identified in 2007, is known officially as the Ruth Mullins fire. “We’ve never met the woman and we don’t know where she lives, but her name now appears in scientific publications that are read all over the world,” says Jennifer O’Keefe, a geologist at Kentucky’s Morehead State University. “She’s got her little bit of immortality.”
O’Keefe is part of a team that has been visiting the Ruth Mullins fire over the past three years, studying its behavior and quantifying the gases that plume from nine known openings in the ground. Last January she and a colleague, University of Kentucky geologist James Hower, brought some students to the coal fire for new measurements. They parked off Highway 80, a road that cuts a swath along the side of Lost Mountain, and unloaded gear in a stingingly cold wind as speeding trucks whipped ice along the asphalt. Trudging up the snow-covered mountain, the scientists shivered along the flat shelf of land circling its midsection, the remains of contour mining in the 1950s. While smoke from the burning mine had been hard to spot from the road, here it billowed from small vents where portals to the mine had collapsed.
Approaching the site, all except Hower (who stayed farther back) donned pink respirators. A student equipped with a GPS device tried to detect the outline of the underground fire by looking for areas where the snow was thinner or melted away entirely. Two other students and O’Keefe settled at a vent, measuring the temperature at the opening and the velocity of the gases (including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, methane, and oxygen) that were flowing out.
