The Centralia Disaster
In the 1950s the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, adopted a disused coal strip mine as a landfill for the town’s trash and garbage. Such practice was not unusual, and in 1956 had spurred the Pennsylvania legislature to pass a precautionary law regulating the use of former strip mines as trash dumps, due to the dangers of fire. Centralia was warned by a member of the state’s Department of Mines and Mineral Industries that its illegal dump site needed to be cleaned up and refilled with non-combustible material. For reasons obscured by time, it was decided to clean up the dumpsite by burning it, and volunteer firemen were hired to perform the task.
The dump was ignited on May 27, and extinguished that evening. On May 29, the dump was reported to be burning again, and was again extinguished. During the first week of June the site was reported to be smoldering several times, and a hole in the pit wall leading to the coal seams underground was discovered as the burning garbage was stirred up to facilitate dousing it with water. By June it was evident that the dump fire had ignited a coal fire which was burning underground. Centralia’s town council asked for help from the Lehigh Valley Coal Company and the Susquehanna Coal Company
Attempts were made to put out the fire by digging out the burning material, which were unsuccessful, as well as drown it with a mixture of crushed gravel and water. The second project was defeated by the cold weather of the Pennsylvania winter, which froze the water in the hoses. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the fire defied efforts to extinguish it, and as time went on alternative versions of its cause were presented, which claimed the fire was burning underground long before the dump site was incinerated. One claimed the fire had spread from another mine fire which had begun in the 1930s, another claimed it was a case of spontaneous combustion.
By the 1980s the US government was offering compensation for residents of Centralia who were forced to relocate as a result of the fire burning beneath their feet. The fire continued to resist all attempts to control or divert it, and has caused the town of Centralia to be evacuated, though a handful of residents remain there, as well as spreading under the town of Byrnesville, which was also evacuated. The fire continued to spread throughout the remainder of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first. In 2013 it passed its fiftieth anniversary of continuous underground and above ground destruction.
The Centralia fire has caused the evacuation of towns, the closing of some roads and the rerouting of others, the opening of sinkholes, and the release of toxic greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. There are many other underground coal fires burning in the United States, which by 2010 had spent more than $1 billion in attempts to control them or mitigate the damage they caused. $42 million was spent by the federal government to relocate the citizens forced to move by the Centralia fire, which to date has not caused any known casualties, other than homes, towns, and businesses. Its environmental impact is still being assessed.