Centralia

Centralia was a thriving mining town, population around 2000, in Pennsylvania. Its prosperity came from the fact that it sat upon 24 million tons of a special long-burning type of coal called anthracite. The anthracite was its downfall too.

In 1962 a fire at a tip on the edge of town ignited a seam of the anthracite. It might be difficult to ignite, but it is even harder to extinguish and despite many attempts by the fire department, involving enormous amounts of water, it simply wouldn’t go out.

Various solutions were proposed, some quite ingenious, but the best estimates had the cost at $20 million, with no guarantees of success. So they let it burn.

17 years later a local petrol station registered the temperature below its tanks at 172 degrees Fahrenheit. Further testing found that at just 13 feet below the tanks that figure rose to 1,000 degrees.

By this time acrid smoke was coming from the ground at various points around town and cellar floors were hot to the touch. Despite this, it was not until 1981 when great pits began to open spontaneously in the ground, one nearly swallowing a young boy, that the town was evacuated at a cost of $42 million.

As people left, their houses were bulldozed, leaving garden paths incongruously leading to nothing. The roads remained though, along with the road signs. Not so much a ghost town, as one that vanished.

Today the ground is still warm, smoke still billows and it is estimated that there is enough coal down there to burn for another 1000 years.