The Centralia Mine Fire: The Pennsylvania Town That Has Been Burning Since 1962

On the old stretch of Pennsylvania Route 61 outside Centralia, the snow does not lie evenly. It melts in long, dark stripes along cracks in the asphalt, and from some of those cracks a thin white plume of steam rises into the cold air. Nothing on the surface is burning. The heat is coming from coal, deep underground, that caught fire in 1962 and has never gone out.

Centralia was once a busy mining borough of more than a thousand people in Columbia County, in the anthracite country of east-central Pennsylvania. Today it is a grid of empty streets, overgrown lots and a handful of surviving buildings. The 2020 census counted five residents. Beneath it, according to current estimates, the fire is burning at depths of up to 300 feet along an eight-mile stretch of some 3,700 acres, and it could keep going for well over a century.

How a town loses a fight with its own bedrock is a story about geology, money and bad luck, and it starts, as far as anyone can tell, with a garbage dump.

A coal town on top of coal

The place began as a tavern. In 1832 Johnathan Faust opened the Bull’s Head Tavern in what was then Roaring Creek Township, and the settlement took the tavern’s name. A mining engineer named Alexander Rae laid out streets and lots and called the village Centreville, but the Post Office already had a Centreville in Schuylkill County, so in 1865 he renamed it Centralia. The first mines opened in 1856. Rae was murdered in his buggy by members of the Molly Maguires in October 1868.

Census records show Centralia at its peak in 1890, with 2,761 residents and seven churches, five hotels, 27 saloons, two theaters, a bank, a post office and 14 general and grocery stores. The coal under it was anthracite, the hard, shiny, high-carbon coal of which eastern Pennsylvania holds the world’s greatest deposits. The state’s Department of Environmental Protection says there are ten named and mined coal beds beneath the borough, and that roughly 25 million tons of coal were in place before mining began.

By 1962 most of the economically recoverable coal had been dug out. Miners had removed 50 to 70 percent of each bed, leaving the rest as pillars to hold up the roof. What remained was a honeycomb of tunnels and chambers, interconnected, full of air and surrounded by coal.

The landfill by the cemetery

In May 1962 the Centralia borough council had a problem with its new landfill. It sat in an abandoned strip-mine pit near the Odd Fellows Cemetery, a hole about 75 feet wide and 50 feet deep that had been dug out around 1935. Memorial Day was coming, and the council wanted the dump cleaned up before people visited the graves.

A 1956 state law regulated landfills in old strip mines, and a state inspector had already warned a councilman that the pit needed to be lined with non-combustible material before it could be used. The state’s own account says no proper barrier of non-combustible shale was ever put in place around the edges of the pit. Under the old pit lay the Buck Mountain coal bed and the mine workings that ran through it.

The most widely told version of what happened next is that the council hired five members of the volunteer fire company to clean up the dump, and that on May 27, 1962, the trash was set alight and then put out. Fires flared up again in the following days. Later a hole about 15 feet wide was found in the north wall of the pit, hidden behind garbage, and it led into the old mine workings. Burning refuse had found its way into the coal.

Not everyone agrees. Joan Quigley, in her 2007 book The Day the Earth Caved In, argued that the fire began when hot ash or coal was dumped into the pit and that the clay barrier was incomplete. Others blame an older 1932 mine fire or spontaneous combustion. A letter the council sent to the Lehigh Valley Coal Company shortly after the fire was noticed described "a fire of unknown origin [starting] on or about June 25, 1962, during a period of unusually hot weather." The cause and even the start date are still debated. Where the fire went is not.

Eight tries in twenty years

By July 1962 there were complaints about foul odors coming from the pit. A mine inspector measured carbon monoxide at levels typical of a mine fire, and in August, after lethal concentrations were found, the mines in the area were closed. The state’s mine reclamation bureau later reported that 23 active mines were ordered shut because fire gases were moving through the connected workings.

The first attempt to dig the fire out began on August 22, 1962. It went badly. Excavation let fresh air rush into the burning workings, which fed the fire, and the crews worked only day shifts. When the project ended on October 29, 1962, the contractor had moved more than 58,000 cubic yards of material and the fire was still alive. A second project tried flushing, pumping crushed rock and sand through boreholes to fill the voids and choke off oxygen. Freezing weather hampered it, and by April 1963 the fire had spread 700 feet to the east.

Over roughly 20 years, firefighters tried eight times to stop it. Writing in Smithsonian magazine in 2005, Kevin Krajick explained why. Trenches were outrun by the fire. Flushing almost never works on a fire this size because it is nearly impossible to fill every pore space, and because coal fires can exceed 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, most fill material simply burns away and leaves new gaps.

Flooding was ruled out too. The state’s engineers calculated that raising the mine pool by about 230 feet still would not cover the upper half of the burning zone, and that pouring water onto a fire this hot risked a steam blow-out. The most complete solution on the table, digging out the entire fire in a pit three-quarters of a mile long and as deep as a 45-story building, was estimated in a 1983 federal study at about $660 million. Krajick noted that was more than all the property in town was worth. Between 1962 and 1978, about $3.3 million was spent on fire control. The fire kept moving.

How a fire breathes underground

An underground coal fire does not roar. It smolders, and the state’s reclamation bureau says a coal mine fire can smolder with as little as one to two percent oxygen. It draws air through the old tunnels and through cracks that reach the surface, and its hot gases escape by many paths, so a steaming vent is not necessarily right above burning coal.

Anthracite is hard to ignite: open flaming of Buck Mountain anthracite takes around 750 degrees Fahrenheit. But once going, it holds heat. More than 2,000 boreholes have been drilled into the Centralia fire area since 1966, and temperatures in them have been recorded above 1,000 degrees, with a maximum of more than 1,350. Readings at the surface have topped 900 degrees.

The fire does not move like a wall of flame. It advances along fronts, or prongs, shaped by the folds of the rock, the slope of the land and the layout of the old mine passages. Over the past 50 years, the state says, it has advanced roughly 50 to 75 feet a year, depending on which front is measured. By January 2012 it was estimated to be affecting about 400 acres at the surface.

As it eats the coal pillars left behind as roof supports, the ground above sinks. That is how the fire reached people.

Warm gardens and a hot gas tank

At first the fire seemed more curious than dangerous. Krajick spoke to Kathy Gadinski, who remembered harvesting tomatoes at Christmas from her naturally heated garden. Some residents no longer had to shovel snow. Then residents began passing out in their homes from carbon monoxide that seeped up through basements.

In 1979 the mayor, John Coddington, who also ran a gas station in town, put a dipstick into one of his underground tanks to check the fuel level. When he pulled it out, it felt hot. He lowered a thermometer on a string and found the gasoline was at 172 degrees Fahrenheit. Route 61, the main road into town, sank eight feet in places, and steam rose from cracks in the pavement.

David DeKok, a reporter for The News-Item in Shamokin, had started covering the fire in late 1976. Over the next ten years he wrote more than 500 articles about it.

The boy in the backyard

On Saturday, February 14, 1981, a group of state officials was touring Centralia. A 12-year-old named Todd Domboski was sent by his family to find out who the visitors were. Cutting across a yard, he saw a wisp of what looked like smoke rising from a small opening in the ground. When he walked over, the ground gave way. He sank to his knees, then dropped out of sight into a hole about four feet wide and, by later measurements, about 150 feet deep.

He grabbed a thick tree root and held on while steam laced with carbon monoxide poured out around him. "It would be a feeling like you could imagine if you were falling through some ice," he told DeKok years later, in a 2002 interview for The Patriot-News. His cousin, Eric Wolfgang, heard him screaming, spotted his red hunting cap in the steam, reached in and pulled him out, covered in mud. Gas inspectors later told him the amount of carbon monoxide in the hole should have killed him.

He suffered no apparent physical harm, though nightmares followed. With officials in town that day, his fall got wide press coverage. A few weeks later, Coddington, by then a former mayor, was overcome by mine fire gases in his home, and the head of the state emergency management agency, DeWitt C. Smith, persuaded Governor Dick Thornburgh to visit.

Paying a town to leave

In 1983 Congress approved about $42 million to buy out and relocate the residents, and relocation began in 1984. The danger was gas and collapsing ground. As the state’s reclamation bureau puts it, the routes by which toxic gases move along fractures and into homes "cannot be consistently predicted or controlled," and the fire’s consumption of the support pillars raises the risk of sudden subsidence.

Most people took the offer. Between 1985 and 1991 the state acquired 545 homes and businesses. More than 1,000 people moved out and hundreds of buildings were demolished, leaving 63 residents at the 1990 census. In 1992 Governor Bob Casey invoked eminent domain on all property in the borough. Including the condemnations of 1992 and 1993, the state puts the cost of relocation at about $41.6 million, and the total public spending on the Centralia fire at about $48.8 million.

A few people refused to go. Krajick found Mayor Lamar Mervine, then 89, still in his house on South Troutwine Street, and an accountant named John Lokitis mowing his former neighbors’ yards. When the Postal Service retired Centralia’s ZIP code, 17927, in the early 2000s, Lokitis stenciled the number onto green park benches around town. In 2009 Governor Ed Rendell began formal eviction proceedings against those who remained. On October 29, 2013, the last seven residents settled: they could stay in their homes for the rest of their lives, with $218,000 for their property and $131,500 more to settle other claims. After they die, the houses go to the state and cannot be sold or inherited.

So the coal goes on burning for nothing, under a town that was paid to disappear, warming the snow on a road nobody drives.

What is left standing

The village of Byrnesville, to the south, was also emptied. In Centralia the grid of streets survives, with a municipal building, a few houses and the cemeteries. The local joke, Krajick reported, was that you could be buried and cremated at the same time. The state says the cemeteries themselves are not on fire.

On the hill above town stands the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Catholic Church, built in 1911 for a congregation of immigrant miners and their families. It is the last church in Centralia. A 1987 survey found it sat on rock rather than coal, so plans to tear it down were dropped, and in 2015 the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church declared it an official pilgrimage site.

In 1993 the state closed about 4,000 feet of Route 61 for good and moved traffic onto a bypass. The abandoned stretch slowly filled with spray paint and became the Graffiti Highway, a magnet for hikers, photographers and riders on all-terrain vehicles. In April 2020, after crowds kept gathering there early in the pandemic, the private owner had about 5,000 feet of it buried under clay and fill.

Not the only one

Centralia is far from unique. The state counts about 38 known actively burning coal mine fires in Pennsylvania alone, and a federal inventory of abandoned mine lands lists 241 coal mine fires in the US. Krajick described another, at Laurel Run near Wilkes-Barre, that has been smoldering since 1915. Worldwide there are thousands. In India’s Jharia coalfield, fires have burned since 1916, and in 2010 there were 68 of them beneath a region of about 58 square miles. Australia’s Burning Mountain, a natural coal seam fire, has been burning for more than 5,500 years.

The fire that outlived the town

Air-quality studies in 2008 found that the outdoor air in the borough met clean air standards, but the state’s advice to visitors remains blunt: the burning zone vents carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and other gases, and even burnt-out areas can collapse without warning or reignite as the ground shifts. Its safety campaign for abandoned mine sites puts it in four words: Stay Out, Stay Alive.

People have proposed using the fire’s heat for something useful, even generating electricity. The state’s verdict is that the fire is too unpredictable to supply the steady, long-term heat a power plant would need. So the coal goes on burning for nothing, under a town that was paid to disappear, warming the snow on a road nobody drives.

Further reading