The ground under Kelley McCreery’s boots was hot. The Campbell County commissioner stood in a crater pockmarking the bone dry prairie, poking a stick into a blackened crevice.
“You can see that that black stuff coming out of there is coal,” he said.
Faint plumes of smoke carried the telltale whiff of sulphury hydrocarbons. On the exposed slope of the crater across from us, a shelf of black rock snaked a few feet below the surface, evidence of the seam.
“You see this burning here, but underneath here it's burning, too,” McCreery added, pointing to our feet. “And it probably goes straight through this hill.”
McCreery and a team from Campbell, Sheridan and Johnson counties have been keenly aware of sites like this across the tricounties since a series of wildfires engulfed the area last summer. The grass fires ignited underground coal seams, presenting new risks. It’s something the coal-rich area has been dealing with for over a century.
Now, the counties are asking FEMA to fund a $1 million mapping initiative to find these slow-burning threats and try to limit their impacts.
“ It takes them years to burn to this point to where it consumes enough that it starts sloughing or opening them up,” said Bryan Borgialli, a fire battalion chief with Campbell County.
Borgialli believed the one we were looking at, about an hour north of Gillette in a remote patch of ranchland, likely got ignited by the Short Draw Fire on Father’s Day weekend in 2016. But it’s the vast scale of last year’s fires atop the coal-laden landscape that has him worried.
“Give it a couple more years, post the fires of last year, and it'll even be more prevalent, because it takes them that long to burn open up and really start to create issues,” he said.
He said coal seam fires like this present several risks, especially a few years after a wildfire moves through, when they’ve had time to build up.
“So like this one, as it opens up, there's more face of it open, more exposed to the elements. It's more probability for it to spread,” he said.
In addition to working through the coal in the ground, a seam fire can ignite grasses or even trees on the surface given gusty winds and dry conditions, causing wildfires.
“ We've had three significant fires out there [off Echeta Road in Campbell County] since 2021 due to coal seams,” Borgialli said. “ This is just another threat that we have out there that can pull resources.”
Another risk is cave ins. The burning seam can superheat the ground above, forming a fragile crust like in Yellowstone National Park.
" Somebody that didn't know what they were looking at would think, 'Where's the hot pool at?'" he said. "But it's literally just coal burning."
As the coal burns down, empty pockets can form beneath the crust.
“ You can fall into these things,” Borgialli said. “If we would've brought a thermal imager or a heat gun, where that coal's burning at, it could be a couple hundred degrees to a thousand plus degrees.”
A long history
Burt Reno is aware of a burning coal seam on his property that’s been around his entire life.
“Ever since I was a little kid,” the rancher said. “Been going up and looking at this thing.”
Reno’s family bought the Reno Ranch around 1980. He said this particular seam was burning before his family owned it, possibly for more than a century.
“It’s spreading,” he said. “You can tell the ground underneath it is warm … That thing’s been burning so long, could be a giant hole in the ground.”
Seam fires in Campbell County’s early coal mines and nearby ranches were enough of an issue that a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) crew trained specially to fight them, said Mary Kelley, historian and author of “Coal in Campbell County.”
“Their job all over the country was making airports and roads in national parks,” she said. “But out here, their job was to put out underground coal fires. [Folks] would get in touch with whoever the top person was at the CCC camp and say, 'I've got a coal fire at my ranch, can your guys come out and help me put it out?’”
Newspaper clippings amassed by Robert Henning at Gillette’s Rockpile Museum describe fiery infernos in the bowels of mines and the CCC crew’s work to snuff them out and keep the nearby rangeland unscathed.
“BLACK DIAMOND MINE IS BURNING: Work Started on Trying to Put Out Fire; Hazard to Range Land in Vicinity,” reads a headline from 1933.
An article from 1940 recounts the CCC’s seven-year effort to snuff out a seemingly endless parade of coal-bed fires that ate into valuable coal deposits in the Little Thunder Basin region. Those fires were believed to have ignited from lightning, spontaneous combustion or neglected campfires, much like today.
But there’s evidence that coal fires set the prairie ablaze, as well.
“In the fall of 1947 a grass fire started in the vicinity which was assumed to have started from burning slack at the [Apple] project,” reads a fire inspection report from June 7, 1949, describing a fire from two years prior. “Several small deposits of slack that had washed from the waste pile were found to be burning after the fire but there were no fires anywhere else in the worked area. Two burned areas, each less than 25 feet across were noted at this time, one about 30 feet from the toe of the waste pile and the other about 50 feet beyond the first. From the ashes remaining the slack in each spot had probably not been over six inches thick. As no fire had been noted in the area before the grass fire it is questionable which started first. However, the ranchers nearby have maintained a fire guard around the area ever since.”
The Bone Pile Creek Fire, also burning near William Apple’s land, was surveyed in 1929 by Charles W. Wells, irrigation engineer for the General Land Office.
“Here I found, upon surveying, a pit of .8 of an acre in area, having an overburden of earth 5 feet thick, consisting of good lignite coal being a 25 foot vein. The fire was burning at that time, and the extent of it has gone 10 or 15 feet farther out on all sides than the pit which is formed by the sinking of the overburden,” Wells wrote. He mentioned that the fire’s isolated location and seemingly dormant state may have led the U.S. Geological Survey to take little notice of it. “However, from what I saw, I consider that there are at least eighty acres surrounding this fire, which, if the fire is allowed to continue, will be consumed.”
Another write up of the Canfield Fire outlines costs incurred by the Bureau of Mines trying to extinguish a burning coal seam and nearby lands in 1950. The fire, believed to have started spontaneously in 1925, continued growing after the mine was abandoned, eventually eating away a pit 850 feet long by 600 feet wide.
“It is estimated that the fire threatened 15,000,000 tons of subbituminous coal reserves,” the report reads. The eventual containment plan called for smothering the fire with compacted incombustible material to a minimum depth of 10 feet, at a cost of $79,187.69.
Handwritten archives at the American Heritage Center in Laramie name and describe other fires, noting “many rattlesnakes around the mines, seeking warmth. They are not so very dangerous though, as they are blind.” The writer added all the mines were fenced to keep livestock from falling into the crevices.
While these larger fires proved costly, smaller ones became attractions for local residents. Local papers recap parties and picnics hosted nearby and even atop burning seams.
One, from Gillette News’ Sept. 12, 1919 edition, describes a senior farewell party for graduates destined for the university in Laramie. “The parties were all taken to the ‘burning coal mine’ in cars where Miss Nichols, Miss Trent, Miss Swartz, Hazel Underwood and William Kissick had supper prepared for them. A fine time although Douglas Gibson and Alma Maycock did forget the butter for the bread.”
Snuffing the seam
Fire Battalion Chief Borgialli said there are a few options to mitigate the seams, though it’s a bit like whackamole trying to keep the fires snuffed.
Option one is to bury the burning parts of the seam with enough dirt that oxygen and moisture can’t get in.
“ But even when you bury it, coal will still burn with limited oxygen,” said Borgialli. “So it's gonna continue to do this. Hopefully, we put enough dirt on top of it.”
The county has buried a few known coal seams near roadways working with landowners.
“ Every time it rains, every time we get a 50 or 60 mile an hour wind next to a highway, it literally [looked] like a coal furnace on the side of a hill,” he said.
While that’s mitigated these roadside attractions, excavating into new earth to bury the seam could also expose more coal and keep the fire going.
Another option is to dig a containment line around the seam and remove as much burnable vegetation as possible from within the circle. The drawback there is reaching the seam with the machinery that makes that work quick and easy. Many of the burning seams are in remote, hard to reach areas on a mix of private, state and public land.
Borgialli said identifying problem areas will probably be the easiest part of dealing with the seams.
The FEMA grant the tricounties are applying for would cover a flyover with a thermal imager, conducted in winter, to map hotspots. Later, crews would need to ground truth each site to ensure it wasn’t a campfire, oil field site, methane hood or something else, but an actual blazing coal seam. Finally, the counties propose collaborating with local landowners, public agencies and neighboring areas to gather knowledge, secure access permission and follow-up with mitigation measures.
This is something neighboring Custer County, Montana has done since 2022, according to Montana Free Press.
Custer County Disaster and Emergency Services Coordinator Cory Cheguis worked with a coal seam mapping group to identify 107 burning coal seams just from the Remington Fire alone. That fire started in Wyoming before crossing into Montana and burning 196,000 acres last year.
Back in 2002 in Campbell County, a trio of wildfires burned some 25,000 acres, igniting an estimated 275 coal seams, Borgialli said.
“ Not all those were mitigated,” he said. “Same issues. We ran into access [to] funding. You know, how do you go deal with those?”
But not trying to address them has its costs, too.
“Yesterday I was on shift,” he said by way of example, “and we got paged to where the Constitution Fire burn scar was. That fire burned a little over 28,000 acres last year.”
He said his department gets pages like that fairly often: A hunter or hiker visiting from out of state who doesn’t know what a smoking coal seam is.
“You go hiking in the hills and you call in and say, ‘Hey, there's a fire.’ And so we go up, we look at it – yep, it's the coal seam. We know it's the coal seam. [Another person] shows up from Texas to go hunting. She goes hiking in the same spot a week later, calls in, ‘Hey, there's another fire.’ … Kind of our message right now is if it's burning in the grass, like you actually see a fire, then absolutely report it. But we know that these are in place and it's just pulling our resources.”
If the seam fire manages to break through to the surface, that’s an even bigger cost.
“ Usually they pop up when we're in Red Flag conditions, fire weather watches, where we've already been run down to the point of people are getting pretty exhausted working weeks on end,” he said. “And then you have a coal seam fire and it's like, of all things, we can't really control it right now, so you just gotta go deal with it.”
He said it can be the same thing for landowners, who are sometimes dealing with the same piece of ground burning every year.
Mapping whatever seam fires exist right now would at least give the county a starting point to make a plan with private landowners and state and federal land managers, said Commissioner McCreery.
“It's a big deal, because anytime you have fires going out in the county, it's going to cost money from the fire department and the road and bridge [department] because it takes everybody to put them out,” he said.
Last summer, the county’s road and bridge department billed the county fire department and the state’s Emergency Fire Suppression Account more than $270,000 – each – for work it did helping contain large fires in the area, according to county invoices.
“If we can get this mapped out and do some simple things to prevent these things from spreading, to me, it's worth all the grant money and all the money that we put into it,” McCreery said. “Hopefully, we do our part and get it mapped out to where then landowners will say, ‘Oh, this is really hot. Yep. We'll go around it and blade it.’”
McCreery said he heard a lot about the seams shortly after the fires last year.
“ And I haven't heard about it since,” he said. “Until their place lights on fire, they don't need nothing. And then when it starts burning, it's, ‘Hurry up and get this out.’ Just like everybody. Nothing's wrong with your house until it starts on fire, then oh, well, we should have changed that fuse box a long time ago.”
That’s a scenario McCreery hopes to avoid. He’d like to see landowners make use of the maps once they are made and mitigate known sites.
“ At least if you build a fire line that jumps it or whatever, at least you say, ‘Well, I tried.’ And everybody can understand that, because you're not going to stop every one, but you can make it pretty safe mostly,” he said.
On his ranch, Burt Reno grazes cattle near the seams he’s aware of to keep vegetative fuels low.
He knows there are more out there. A friend once heat-mapped Reno’s land with an infrared drone.
“It’s eerie,” he said. “You wouldn’t even know there’s a raging fire underneath the ground over there, but there is. The technology of that infrared drone is pretty helpful, even just gaining awareness.”
He said the invisible threats don’t take up a lot of his brain space – “not yet, anyway.”
He said he wasn’t sure if he’d be up for mitigating the seams on his land. Hiring heavy equipment to dig a containment line is expensive on top of his ranching margins.
“How do you manage 50 raging infernos that aren’t hurting me right now, but they might hurt me later?”
For now, he’s gambling that they’ll burn themselves out, like some he’s seen. He thought they’d burn for eternity, but it turns out, that’s not always the case.
