Just Another Regular Blog

beauxa:

for sixpenceee: This town has been burning for 50 years.

In what seems like the plot to a disaster movie, the quiet town of Centralia, Pennsylvania has endured a burning problem since 1962: It’s been on fire, literally, for the past 53 years. No one knows exactly how the Centralia fire started, but the strongest theory is that burning trash from a nearby landfill accidentally ignited coal below an old entrance to the mine. The fire then spread through the mines

The 1,000 residents that lived in Centralia at the time thought the fire was a silly inconvenience at first. But that changed when sulfurous fumes and carbon monoxide began seeping out of the mine, nearly suffocating them in their homes. The underground fire also fractured the ground, making sinkholes pop up all over the place. A 12-year-old was nearly consumed by one in 1981.

The town has tried in vain to snuff out the flames over the years. They drilled holes into the mine and plugged them up with wet sand to choke off the air supply, but it didn’t work. They stopped trying to put it out in the 1980s and haven’t made another attempt since.

The state government condemned Centralia in 1992 and almost all of its residents left. Today, just about a dozen people live there.

The town of Centralia influenced the making of the film Silent Hill.