SAWDUST VOLCANOES

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4823, 16 March 1925, Page 1

SAWDUST VOLCANOES

BURNING FOR TWENTY YEARS.

TROUBLES IN TIMBER COUNTRY.

The American North-west is having its troubles with sawdust volcanoes (writes a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian). Puget Sound and the land-locked coast near Seattle is one ‘ interminable succession of sawmills. Hour after hour, as you pass along in the train, you are hardly ever out of sight of them. The States of Oregon and Washington are still almost one vast forest, istrongly reminiscent of Siberia. For scores of yeais logs have been slithered down into the Pacific and the] rivers, and cheaply rafted round to these mills to be cut into planks. Piles of sawdust have grown into hills, and hills into n ou.ncanis—and mountains ! nto colcar.oos - Every now and then these slumbering volcanoes* burst Into smoke and flames. Rightly or wrongly, spontaneous combustion is said to be the cause. It is very difficult co put. out a sawdust volcano, and the peculiarly dense smoke literally drives family after family from its homo when the wind blows that way. In Port Angeles, Washington, one; has now been smouldering on and off for twenty years. Another, at Letshi Beach, near Seattle, has become active again after a year of slumber, and been subdued for the time being only after the fire brigade had played hoses on it for hours. At Evoret a ten-acre tritet of sawdust waste has been intermittently alight for eight or nine years. Chemical treatment has proved costly and unsuccessful, and no industry appears to be willing to fetch away and utilise its sawdust, even as a free gift.