There’s a bunch of ghost towns in the tri-state area that I’ll write about every so often…
….abandoned towns or buildings always remind me of Emily and her Weird NJ magazines, adventuring into closed down looney bins shooting away with the camera… It’s really an unexplainable eery feeling being in a place like that, especially the mental hospitals with files still sprawled all around and empty beds everywhere.
Centralia, Pennsylvania was a small coal mining community of 2,671 that went through a strange series of events leading up to it’s demise. In 1962 the town workers lit a huge pile of trash in the landfill which at the time was a common occurrence, however this one time an exposed vein of highly flammable coal in the ground was ignited.
There have been numerous attempts to put the fire out over the following two decades, flushing with water, and excavating the coal, all with no success.
“Experts determined that the only option remaining to effectively battle the fire would be a massive trenching operation, at the cost of about $660 million, with no guarantee of success. Left with such limited options, the state of Pennsylvania basically condemned the entire town, and spent $42 million in government funds relocating most of its residents.”
The underground fire still burns today, covering about 400 acres and there is enough coal to burn for 250 years, though it is expected the fire will burn out in 100 years or so.
“In its prime, Centralia was a vibrant community with five hotels, seven churches, nineteen general stores, two jewelry stores, and about twenty-six saloons. Today it is a modern ghost town whose guts have been burned out, and whose main path of ingress has been closed and detoured. Residents are expected to return in 2016 to open a time capsule which was buried in the town in 1966, back when the town’s future was still somewhat optimistic. Its future now is decidedly more grim… There are currently no further plans to extinguish the fire, and most modern maps no longer show a dot where Centralia once stood.”
day trip anyone?