Centralia: the American town burning from below

Centralia is a town that is being slowly erased by a fire nobody can put out. In 1962, a coal seam beneath the borough caught fire, and it has been burning ever since. The ground is hot, the roads are cracked, and the smoke rises through the streets. Most of the residents were bought out and moved away, and only a handful remain.

The fire that started in 1962

Centralia grew up in the nineteenth century as an anthracite coal town in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, with mines, a railroad and a population of well over a thousand. The coal beneath the town was its livelihood and, eventually, its destruction. In 1962, a fire was lit in an old mine or a rubbish dump — the exact cause is disputed — and it reached the coal seam.

Coal fires are notoriously hard to fight. The seam burned underground, spreading through the tunnels and under the streets. The ground became hot, sinkholes opened, and carbon monoxide and other gases began to seep into homes. The town tried to fight the fire, and failed.

A town bought out

As the fire spread, the state and federal governments decided that Centralia could not be saved. In the 1980s, residents were offered money to move, and most took it. In 1992 the borough claimed all the remaining property under eminent domain, and the town was condemned. Families were relocated, buildings were demolished, and the streets began to disappear.

The population fell from around 1,000 in 1980 to a handful. Centralia’s ZIP code was discontinued in 2002, and the state closed the section of Route 61 that ran above the burning seam. In 2013, the remaining residents reached an agreement with the authorities allowing them to stay in their homes for the rest of their lives. As of 2020, only five people remained.

Smoke on the horizon

Centralia today is a strange, quiet place: a grid of empty streets, a few scattered houses, a cemetery, and the closed road — the ‘Graffiti Highway’ — where visitors once came to paint messages on the cracked asphalt. Smoke still rises from vents in the ground, and the fire is expected to burn for decades, perhaps centuries, to come.

Centralia is one of the most famous abandoned places in the United States, and it belongs beside Wittenoom in Australia and Pripyat in Ukraine in this archive — towns emptied not by economics but by a disaster, and left to the slow work of the ground beneath them.

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Related places

If this one stayed with you, these entries sit in the same corner of the archive:

• Wittenoom: the town Australia erased from the map — Australia
• Uranium City: the boomtown that lost its reason to exist — Canada
• Pripyat: the city that was evacuated in a day — Ukraine