Crews use water jets at mine

EIGHTY-FOUR, Pa. (AP) -- One hundred people using more than a million gallons of water had apparently begun to battle back a fire in a western Pennsylvania coal mine Tuesday night, officials said.
Crews had apparently contained the fire 660 feet underground in the 84 Mine, about 25 miles south of Pittsburgh, with two unmanned jets of water and a slowly advancing team of mine rescue workers. The fire, discovered Monday morning, was contained in a 200-foot stretch of the tunnel used to move miners and machinery along a 2-mile block of coal, said Tom Hoffman, a spokesman for Consol Energy, which owns the mine.
"We have thrown a noose around the fire and are tightening the noose," Hoffman said.
More than 80 miners working in the mine were alerted to the fire by carbon monoxide sensors and escaped without injury, Hoffman said.
Hoffman said officials had not determined how the fire started.
The mine encompasses an area of about 10 square miles in southeastern Washington County, but only about two miles of the corridors are active at any one time, Hoffman said.
Consol officials said they knew of no previous fires at the mine. The last Consol mine fire burned for weeks in 1999 near Fairview, W.Va., at the Loveridge Mine and caused a methane explosion. That mine remained closed for two years.
The mine will remain closed until the fire is extinguished.