Centralia, Pa., exists more in fiction than it does in reality. In 1962, the town burned their trash to clean up for Memorial Day. This trash was in an abandoned pit mine with an exposed seam of coal at the bottom — the fire still burns today, but the town is gone despite governmental efforts and attention from the arts community.

There have been at least six novels, three dramas, a comedy troupe, five films, five nonfiction books and a comic series inspired by the Centralia fire. While watching ‘The Town That Was,’ a documentary about Centralia that is available online, I remember thinking that this story would lend itself to a narrative. There is the fantastic image of a 50-yearlong fire burning under a town, discussions on what makes a place home and sulfur-laced steam bursting out of the ground. Apparently, everyone else thought so, too.

A telltale sign of the fire was when the local gas station kept losing fuel to vaporization and pumping gas at 130 F. Attempts to extinguish the fire were too late and underfunded, and the fire grew and became too big and expensive for the state to deal with.

Residents were plagued with carbon monoxide poisoning and respiratory issues, and 12-year-old boy was almost killed when the ground collapsed underneath him. No one ever died; there was never one acute event to solidify this as a tragedy worth noticing. Except for an entire community being dismantled, no big deal.

In 1984, the U.S. Congress put $42 million into relocation costs and offered residents buyouts to move to neighboring communities. Most residents took advantage of this, and in 1992, Gov. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania declared eminent domain over the whole town and condemned every building.

Today it is a waiting game for the last six residents to leave so that the town can be torn apart. The coal itself is not fueling the fire, but rather the methane gas that is trapped with it. Whoever puts out the fire will have to extract the anthracite coal and stands to make a fortune.

I was shocked that this happened in the United States. As a developed country, I had assumed the appropriate government agencies would have made better attempts to put the fire out. The technology existed. Within days after the fire started, they could have dug a trench too deep for the fire to jump and cut off its fuel supply. It was an easy, obvious fix.

All of the buildings without inhabitants had been completely demolished and removed, leaving no sign of their existence. There are eerie city blocks of empty grassy lots and intermittent areas of hot steam rising from the earth.

The remnant of Route 61 running by the town, later circumvented, is four lanes of warped asphalt scarred with steaming cracks full of beer cans and crusted over with a rainbow of lewd graffiti. The highway is where the town failed to go quietly, this is where it went kicking and screaming.

All of the government assistance that came too late and all of the creative pieces its story inspired couldn’t save it. I hope we have learned that there is no official safety net; we have to make one for ourselves.

Leanna Mulvihill is a senior forest engineering major and environmental writing and rhetoric minor. Her column appears every Tuesday. She can be reached at lpmulvih@syr.edu.

 

Published on October 16, 2011 at 12:00 pm