I recall a goodly number of years back when my fire chief was appearing before the County Board during their annual budget hearings. One of the supervisors decided to get testy and asked him: “How many fires did your department put out last year, Chief?” To which the chief answered: “All of them.” And that was the end of that.
When you stop and think about it, isn’t that the case for all the fire departments? At the end of the year you go out and look around and, by golly, every one of them has gone out. Of course, how much destruction and property damage results before it goes out is the primary concern of the insurance companies and the citizens. The taxpayers ultimately make that decision by deciding, through their elected representatives, just how much of a fire defense they are willing to pay for. And for most of them, all they really see is that all the fires have gone out.
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But what if you had a fire that didn’t go out? What if it just kept burning? When would they say “Enough! Put the darn thing out!” I thought about that yesterday when I saw that the world’s longest-burning, unfriendly fire had finally been extinguished. It was in China and had been burning, despite all attempts to put it out, for 180 years. That’s right….one-eight-zero with no decimal points in there.
The United Press International reported:
More than $53 million had been spent over the past decade trying to extinguish the Rujigou coal field fire, which had consumed about 1 million tons of high-quality anthracite coal annually, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported Sunday. The underground inferno was finally put out last month.
Officials had estimated the fire caused economic loss of $40 million and discharged 90,000 tons of hazardous substances into the air each year.
It’s not certain how the coal fire started but folklore has it that ill-treated miners set their mine on fire because of a beef with their boss.
Ah, the old labor-management thing again. Sometimes it just gets out of hand. Can you imagine going to work every day for 10 years doing nothing but trying to extinguish the same fire? Don’t even think about it.
Let’s get the equipment checked out. I’ll see you at the coffee table.
