The coal that made this valley famous accreted in layers over tens of thousands of years, organic swamp matter turning first to peat, and then compressed over millennia into billions of tons of anthracite—the densest and most pure form of coal—the stuff that made this region of Pennsylvania famous. Mines first opened here in 1856 and Centralia was incorporated as a town a decade later. Through the years bitter labor disputes broke out over exploitative treatment of the (largely Irish immigrant) miners, leading to regular outbreaks of violence. Add to that the boom and bust cycle of the coal industry—and the environmental desolation and impoverishment of the region—and you end up with a town that is deeply scarred, both literally and metaphorically.
But the story that made Centralia famous began in May 1962, when officials set fire to the trash in a local landfill in an open strip-mine pit. This wasn’t the first year they’d done this, and there were firefighters stationed to ensure the blaze didn’t get out of control. After two days, the trash fire seemed to have burned itself out. But this time, for whatever reason (the actual cause was never fully determined), something went wrong. The landfill burn had lit the coal mines beneath the town.
Over the years, numerous attempts were made to put out the fire. Nothing worked. In all, federal, state, and local governments spent over $3.3 million on the blaze, which raged on, uncontrollably. Over time, residents reported that their basements were strangely hot, and in 1979, the mayor John Coddington lowered a thermometer into an underground fuel tank at the gas station he owned, only to discover that the gasoline was 172 degrees Fahrenheit. And then on Valentine’s Day, 1981, a twelve-year old boy fell into a four-foot sinkhole that opened up in his grandmother’s backyard, barely rescued by his fourteen year-old cousin. A plume of lethal carbon monoxide bellowed out from the hole.
Realizing that topsoil was the only thing separating the town from a massive, raging inferno, the federal government finally decided to clear the town. The United States Congress allocated money for a buyout, which nearly all of the town’s 1,000 or so residents took. By 1990, 63 people remained in the town. Two years later, governor Bob Casey invoked eminent domain and condemned all the remaining buildings. By 2021, only five homes were still left standing.