Fire rages beneath small town

There was nothing extraordinary about Centralia until the ground under it caught fire more… There was nothing extraordinary about Centralia until the ground under it caught fire more than 40 years ago.

It was just another northeast Pennsylvania coal town 50 years ago, in which workers had pulled anthracite coal — the hardest and most rare kind — from the ground. They had shops, a post office and labor disputes, just like Ashland or Avondale or any of the other anthracite towns.

After World War II, production began to drop, and large-scale anthracite production was over by 1959.

Centralia stopped production; the town had done its job. But in 1962, a pile of trash caught fire in an open pit mine, igniting an exposed vein of coal. The trash fire was soon quenched, but the coal fire spread underground.

The state drilled boreholes to monitor the spread, but that only added air to the fire.

The state government moved the first three families out of town in 1969. State workers dug a trench north of the cemetery to try to contain the fire, which by that point had spread through other veins and old coalmines. The workers dug only one shift per day, and took Labor Day off. Some residents still argue that their pace determined the project’s success or failure.

As the soil became ash, the fumes became unbearable in some places, and the vegetation in and around town began to die. Some trees continued to stand tall as bark was whisked off by wind and branches tumbled to the ground, leaving them as naked carcasses.

The ground collapsed under a man in 1981, nearly killing him and resulting in Centralia appearing in national newspapers. The government proposed a buy-out to the town’s landowners, and they accepted. Putting the fire out, once possible for $175, would now cost more than $650 million, and may not have worked.

In 1991, 26 homes along Route 61 were condemned and bought by the government. The families moved away, and no one made more plans to fight the fire.

In 1997, Centralia’s population was 44. Now, it is about 16.

Some Centralians refused to leave town; now they are slowly leaving or dying. Some believed the government was trying to get its hand on the remaining valuable coal. Until the town is completely deserted, the legal battles regarding the homes still standing in town continue quietly in Harrisburg.

After the last people leave, the future of Centralia is unknown. One concern is that the fire may spread to threaten the borough of Ashland, less than two miles to the south.

The last business in town, the Speed Spot Cafe at Routes 61 and 42, closed a few years ago, and was burned, possibly by vandals. Tourists sometimes stop on Route 61 to see the smoke rising from the black dirt and rock over the mine fire. Trash is strewn everywhere in the fields and behind the houses that remain.

A skeleton of streets and foundations still remains in town, as if waiting for people to return. All that remains of the original church are two cemeteries, both gated and full.

A new section of Route 61 had to be built when the road buckled and breached from the collapse of dirt and rise of gas under it. The old part, now cracked and bent, is sometimes used by sightseers and all-terrain vehicles.

Centralia became one of Pennsylvania’s last ghost towns after more than 40 years of study, law and attempts at prevention. One of the leading producers in the anthracite belt is now a smoking ruin between two hills in southern Columbia County. From the Orthodox church on the north hill, some of the remaining Centralians go to services and watch the smoke rise from their town on a cold day.

You can still see the lines and shapes of how Centralia appeared below, but they are nothing but shadows now.