Centralia Mine Fire

Anthracite coal was mined in Centralia, Pennsylvania, for more than a hundred years. What we today call the Centralia mine fire is a direct legacy of the environmental devastation of that era and the failure of government or private industry to face up to the damage that had been done to  and the risks that remained. In my book, Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire, I tell the story of how an underground fire destroyed Centralia. I witnessed much of the second half of the story and researched the rest.

Centralia was a pleasant community of about 1,435 people  in 1962. On May 27 of that year, with the best of intentions, a fire was set in Centralia’s garbage dump by five members of Centralia’s volunteer fire ocmpany who had been hired by the borough council. They had always done this, because the dump had always been next to one cemetery or another, and with Memorial Day and many grave visits approaching, they wanted to get rid of the offending odors and unsightly refuse as best they could.

The firemen piled the trash in one corner of the pit, set it afire and later washed down the smoldering ashes with fire hoses. But this year things went horribly wrong and the fire found its way through a hole in the pit into the vast, black labyrinth of abandoned coal mines that lay beneath Centralia. The borough council tried desperately to put out the underground fire, but after a few days it was beyond their reach. Soon enough, the true origin of the fire would be obscured, wrongly labeled as spontaneous combustion. A 1958 Pennsylvania law had outlawed the setting of dump fires for this very reason–the threat of mine fires.

Over the next two decades, the people of Centralia watched as repeated state and federal efforts to stop the fire failed either for lack of sufficient funding or political clout. In 1979, after the U.S. Bureau of Mines closed a vent pit left open in 1963 to pull the fire and gases away from the town, the fire broke through an underground fly ash barrier installed in earlier years and moved under the town itself, sending dangerous gases into one home after another and causing the ground to collapse. A once pleasant and neighborly community was torn apart by dissension between those who were terrified and wanted to leave, and those who, betting the fire would never get to them, demanded to stay and ridiculed the others for their fears.

In the end, repeated and hard-hitting press coverage of the town’s plight by me and  other journalists forced a resolution. The federal government announced in 1983 that it would cost too much and destroy too much of Centralia  to dig out the fire. Congress then appropriated $42 million to relocate anyone who wanted to leave; the fire was allowed to burn. Today, fewer than six people remain and most of the town has been demolished. Centralia and its mine fire symbolize the folly of the notion that man can abuse the environment without consequence.