Scary stuff. We live in close proximity to some of those coal fires. They are not controllable---period! The closest one to use is in Centralia . In my younger years, my brother and I ran a hill climb there every year. The road progressively got worse with great dips and sways from the mine shafts collapsing below. Eventually they dropped that hill climb from the schedule. Some years after that and tremendous failures at stopping the fire the state bought up all the houses and moved the people out. As is usually the case some didn't want to go---but when the houses started collapsing they became a bit more negotiable. Today there is almost no sign of a town ever having been there.
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis