Environmental Catastrophes

The Gulf oil spill is a notable gigantic environomental disaster. But it isn't the only one.

I remember in my childhood reading about a coal mine in Pennsylvania that has been burning for decades. Here is Wikipedia's text about the Centralia coal seam fire:

It is not known for certain how the fire that made Centralia essentially uninhabitable was ignited. One theory asserts that in May 1962, the Centralia Borough Council hired five members of the volunteer fire company to clean up the town landfill, located in an abandoned strip-mine pit next to the Odd Fellows Cemetery. This had been done prior to Memorial Day in previous years, when the landfill was in a different location. The firefighters, as they had in the past, set the dump on fire and let it burn for a time. Unlike in previous years, however, the fire was not extinguished correctly. ...

The fire remained burning underground and spread through a hole in the rock pit into the abandoned coal mines beneath Centralia. Attempts to extinguish the fire were unsuccessful, and it continued to burn throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Adverse health effects were reported by several people due to the byproducts of the fire, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and a lack of healthy oxygen levels.

Section of the former route of PA Route 61 closed due to mine fire
In 1979, locals became aware of the scale of the problem when a gas-station owner and then mayor, John Coddington, inserted a stick into one of his underground tanks to check the fuel level. When he withdrew it, it seemed hot, so he lowered a thermometer down on a string and was shocked to discover that the temperature of the gasoline in the tank was 172 °F (77.8 °C). Statewide attention to the fire began to increase, culminating in 1981 when 12-year-old resident Todd Domboski fell into a sinkhole four feet wide by 150 feet (46 m) deep that suddenly opened beneath his feet in a backyard. Only the quick work of his cousin Eric Wolfgang in pulling Todd out of the hole saved Todd's life, as the plume of hot steam billowing from the hole was measured as containing a lethal level of carbon monoxide.

Today I ran across this reference (see the picture) to Dervaza, a huge catastrophe of which I was completely ignorant until today:

While drilling in 1971 geologists accidentally found an underground cavern filled with natural gas.[1] The ground beneath the drilling rig collapsed, leaving a large hole with a diameter of about 50–100 meters at 40°15′10″N 58°26′22″E. To avoid poisonous gas discharge, it was decided to burn the gas.[2] Geologists had hoped the fire would go out in a few days but it has been burning ever since. Locals have named the cavern The Door to Hell.

For the disaster enthusiasts in the crowd, Wikipedia has a list of coal seam fires around the world. And it has a list of oil spills.

Bottom line: humans make costly mistakes. Like the financial crisis of 2008, a few in a hurry cut corners to pocket a private benefit and leave a disaster for the rest of us to clean up. Those who cut the corners hardly ever pay to social costs of their messes.

(The latest example was the fact that Abby Sunderland caused $200,000 of expenses to rescue her from her solo sailing adventure when her mast broke. She won't pay back the cost. The taxpayers in Australia will eat the cost. And Abby? She has publicly said she plans to "try again!" Why not when the upside is huge -- lots of publicity and money -- and the downside is very limited -- pawn the costs onto others.)