Coal dust burns boy walking in park

Eight-year-old Matt Bershinski was running through a Rockrimmon park Monday, playing with the garter snake he'd just caught, enjoying a hot summer day in the trees.

But the heat outside was nothing compared to what he stepped into, an 800-degree invisible inferno that caused second-degree burns and melted one of his plastic clogs to his foot.

It turned out to be coal dust left over from Colorado Springs' mining days, combusted by the heat and sunshine. The bizarre situation initially confounded firefighters, who wondered if it was caused by an underground mine fire. There was no smoke or flames.

"Seriously, you couldn't even make something like this up. It's stranger than fiction," Matt's mother, Suzie Bershinski, said Tuesday from The Children's Hospital in Denver, where he is being treated.

A team of mining experts and geologists visited Golden Hills Park on Delmonico Drive on Tuesday and ruled out a mine fire. They found no other areas with coal dust.

The coal dust covered about one-tenth of an acre, two feet deep. A byproduct of mining, it was probably there for decades, though officials said they are puzzled as to why it is at the park, a half-mile from the nearest mine entrance.

Back then, coal dust was often dumped on the ground or in rivers, something that would be illegal today.

"It could have been in the '20s or '30s when there weren't any laws," said Al Amundson, engineer with the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining, and Safety.

It was the first time Amundson said he had heard of coal dust from Colorado Springs mines causing a problem. While there are undoubtedly other areas where coal dust was left on the ground, much of the region has been built over, disturbing the dust and removing the threat.

The largest of the Colorado Springs coal mines was Pikeview Mine, which produced 11 million tons of coal from 1897 to 1957 and employed 300 miners. Amundson said he suspects the coal dust was dumped on the ground by the Pikeview miners. Grass and weeds then grew over the dust, and it went unnoticed as homes, streets and parks were built over the 75 miles of tunnels dug beneath Rockrimmon. He said the vegetation may have been stripped by precipitation, exposing the coal dust to the sun.

City officials had no idea the dust was there when the city bought the land for a park in 1981, parks director Paul Butcher said.

Emergency officials hosed down the area, put up fences and called the state for help, said Lt. Julie Stone of the Colorado Springs Fire Department. City crews planned to put dirt over the coal dust and put down vegetation, Butcher said.

Some residents of Delmonico Townhomes, next to the park, weren't worried about a flare-up.

"I think it's probably an isolated thing, but sure there's concern," resident Ann Axelrod said.

Matt will be OK, though he will be in the hospital for a couple of days, and it will be several weeks before he can walk normally, his mother said. The plastic was burned into his left foot, and he had lesser burns on his right foot.

"He's a pretty cool little guy," she said. "He caught the snake and made sure he didn't drop it into the hot area when this was going on."