Welcome to Centralia – the Town that Burned from Beneath

If you drive north on Route 61 in northeastern Pennsylvania, U.S., you will come across an innocent looking detour at the top of a low mountain.  Thinking nothing of it, drivers follow the signs around something unseen, perhaps road construction up ahead or a bridge repair.  Upon closer inspection however, it seems to be a permanent closure of the road to Centralia. 

You’re soon back on the highway and greeted by an eerie site, the ghost town that is Centralia, Pennsylvania.  Vacant, weed-filled lots occupy a grid of empty streets.  Sidewalks remain, but all the houses are gone.  Here and there, tufts of grey smoke appear to be coming from the earth itself. In some cases, a ring of chain link fences circle the smoke holes.

What on earth could have caused the abandonment and demolition of an entire town?

In began innocuously enough in May 1962, when a careless trash fire was started in a landfill that was also an abandoned, coal strip mine. The fire department doused the pit with water for hours and they thought the fire was out.  Unfortunately, it was not. This is the Pennsylvania Coal Region, once home to hundreds of deep anthracite mines, now largely abandoned. The fire snaked underground along old coal veins, sucking in air and venting hot smoke up through cracks in the earth. 

Eventually, it followed those coal veins and slowly crept underneath quiet Centralia itself. The fire began venting poisonous gases up through the basements of homes and businesses.  With a slow horror, residents realized that the underground fire had reached their town.  Worse still, it could not be extinguished, or even burn itself out in the near future — not until ALL the coal under the mountain was removed or consumed.

The fire slowly worked its way under row after row of family homes and businesses. Vent holes of white smoke appeared in backyards. The threat of house fires, asphyxiation, and carbon monoxide poisoning became a daily fact of life. For the next two decades, the town attempted to battle the fire. The fire company flushed the mine holes with rivers of water. They excavated the burning veins and dug trenches. The state back-filling the vent holes to try and suffocate it. They dug AGAIN and AGAIN in an vain attempt to find the boundaries of the fire.

By the 1980s, the fire had affected over 200 acres of Centralia. Residents had to abandon their homes as carbon monoxide had reached life threatening levels inside.  A study concluded that the fire could burn for another 100 years or more and spread over 3,700 acres of the mountain.  The state government eventually became involved and declared Centralia municipalis non grata. Route 61 had to be permanently detoured around the borough.

Centralia was slowly abandoned, house by house, street by street.

Properties were condemned, citizens relocated, and their homes demolished, all costing about $42 million. The town hoped to dig a 500-foot deep trench completely across the hilltop on which Centralia sat, holding back the fire and saving half the town. To no one’s surprise, the expensive trench was never dug. A few die hard residents remained in their homes, their hopes pinned on continued efforts to contain the blaze. 

Ironically today, the Centralia Fire Department is the only modern building still remaining, along with two houses. The Assumption BVM Church sits up on the mountain side overlooking the ghost town.  522 homes are gone in all.  The hillsides are peppered with holes spewing noxious gases.  Large cracks and pits make most streets through town undrivable. Though there are no visible flames, you can feel the heat radiating from the breaches in the earth.  Tall metal pipes emerge from the ground about 8 feet tall, ringed by small protective fences. In winter, like the geysers at Yellowstone National Park, snow never sticks because the ground is too warm around the smoke vents. 

Over 62 years and 42 million dollars later, the fire still burns on several fronts underneath Centralia and the surrounding mountain.  But the cracked sidewalks, vacant streets and empty, weed-filled plots remain, along with a handful of aging holdouts.  By 2000, the fire had moved into Saints Peter and Paul Cemetery, with white smoke eerily wafting up around the silent, grey tombstones.  In 2004, the PA Department of Environmental Protection explicitly discouraged visitors from stopping in and exploring Centralia.

Curious people like myself irresistibly come anyway, renaming it Helltown USA, drawn to the eerie, empty streets, peppered with fissures oozing white smoke.  Thousands of visitors covered the old road into town with graphic graffiti becoming Graffiti Highway.  A PBS Documentary on the mine fire was made in 1982, interviewing several Centralia residents. In 2013, the seven remaining elderly residents reached an agreement with the state allowing them to remain in their beloved homes until they died.  By 2020 only 5 remained. That same year, Graffiti Highway was sadly covered with a thick layer of dirt, ending a decades-long attraction.

I grew up just a few miles from Centralia, Pennsylvania. As a young boy, I witnessed the citizens rebellion against the state, the sad evacuations of homes, and the slow demolition of this quaint little mountain town. The poor residents certainly did not deserve this unfortunate end.  But when mankind plays recklessly with nature’s resources, leaving a hazardous mess behind, nature has a way of fighting back.

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