China puts out 50-year-old fire

Firefighters in north-western China have extinguished a fire that had burned in an underground coal seam for a half-century, state media reported on Wednesday. It took firefighters more than three years to put out the blaze by drilling into the burning coal bed and pouring water and slurry into it, and then finally covering the surface to starve it of oxygen, Xinhua news agency said.
The fire, 100 metres (yards) underground in the Terak coal field in Xinjiang region, had consumed more than 12 million tonnes of coal and released over 70,000 tonnes of toxic gases annually since the 1950s, it said.