A fire under a Pennsylvania town has been burning since 1962

In eastern Pennsylvania, a coal seam has been smoldering underground for more than six decades, long enough to empty out an entire town and turn its streets into a tourist curiosity. The fire started as a routine landfill cleanup and never stopped.

How a trash fire reached the coal

The mine fire beneath Centralia, Pennsylvania has been burning since at least May 27, 1962, though its exact cause remains disputed among historians and former officials. That day, the borough council arranged for a cleanup of the town landfill, an abandoned strip-mine pit, ahead of the Memorial Day holiday. Workers set the trash alight, then doused the visible flames, but fire reappeared over the following weeks despite repeated attempts to extinguish it with hoses and a bulldozer.

The hole that changed everything

A regional mine inspector had already warned Centralia officials that the landfill pit needed to be filled with non-combustible material because it connected to older mine workings underneath the town, a concern detailed in the account of the Centralia mine fire. Investigators later found a roughly 15-foot gap in the base of the pit’s north wall that had been concealed by garbage and never properly sealed. That opening is believed to have given the surface fire a direct path into the extensive, interconnected anthracite coal mines running beneath the borough, and once the fire reached that labyrinth, it found an effectively unlimited fuel source protected from the elements.

Failed attempts to dig it out

Pennsylvania’s Department of Mines and Mineral Industries funded a series of excavation and flushing projects between 1962 and 1963 aimed at reaching and smothering the fire before it could spread. A contractor named Bridy Inc. excavated tens of thousands of cubic yards of earth along the fire’s northern perimeter, but breaching the underground chambers let in fresh oxygen that accelerated the burn rather than containing it, and the project ran out of funding in October 1962. A follow-up plan to pump a crushed-rock slurry into the mines ahead of the fire’s path also failed, hampered by an unusually harsh winter that froze water lines and slurry equipment. By March 1963, after spending more than $42,000 on the two projects, the state abandoned efforts to physically stop the fire.

A hot gas tank and a boy who nearly disappeared

For years afterward, the fire’s effects went largely unnoticed at the surface. That changed in 1979, when Centralia’s mayor at the time, checking fuel levels at his gas station, pulled out a dipstick that felt hot and measured the temperature of the gasoline in an underground tank at more than 170 degrees Fahrenheit. Attention intensified in 1981, when a 12-year-old resident fell into a sinkhole that suddenly opened beneath him in a backyard, a hole four feet wide and roughly 150 feet deep venting steam later measured to contain lethal levels of carbon monoxide. He survived by clinging to a tree root until a cousin pulled him out, an incident that helped push the mine fire from a local nuisance into a statewide emergency. Beginning in the early 1980s, residents also began reporting headaches, breathing trouble, and other symptoms they attributed to carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide seeping into homes from the underground fire, adding public-health pressure to the case for a full-scale response.

Relocation, eminent domain, and a town that mostly vanished

Congress approved more than $42 million in 1984 to relocate Centralia residents, and most accepted buyout offers over the following years. Pennsylvania’s governor invoked eminent domain over remaining properties in 1992, and the U.S. Postal Service revoked the borough’s ZIP code in 2002. A small group of residents fought the condemnation orders in court for years, eventually reaching an agreement in 2013 that allowed the handful of holdouts to remain in their homes for the rest of their lives, after which the borough would take title to the properties. Centralia’s population fell from roughly 1,500 residents around the time the fire is believed to have started to just a handful of occupied homes today.

Still burning, decades of fuel left

The fire currently burns at depths of up to 300 feet across an 8-mile stretch covering roughly 3,700 acres beneath the former borough and the neighboring area once known as Byrnesville, which was also abandoned and demolished. At its current rate of spread, government estimates cited in the fire’s documented history suggest it could continue burning for more than 250 years, consuming coal seams far beyond the reach of any economically viable excavation project. The site has since drawn visitors interested in the abandoned streets and the steam vents still visible in the landscape, though a stretch of cracked, graffiti-covered highway that once attracted much of that attention was covered with soil in 2020 to block public access.

Increased underground air pressure from the heat has also produced an unexpected side effect: when heavy rain seeps into the old mine workings, the combination of trapped heat and water occasionally forces steam and water up through boreholes with enough force to create Pennsylvania’s only known geyser, located on private property in nearby Ashland. That geyser is deliberately kept accessible as an informal flood-control outlet for the surrounding mine network. Decades after the borough’s population collapsed from roughly 1,500 to a handful of residents, Centralia remains a working case study in how an ordinary municipal decision, burning trash in an old strip-mine pit, can set off a geological process that outlasts the people who caused it.

This article was created with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor.