There’s this little town in Pennsylvania called Centralia. Nestled at the very bottom of Columbia County near the center of the Keystone State, Centralia is famous for a giant mine fire that’s been raging just below the tiny borough’s surface since 1962. The result of a misguided attempt to clean up the town landfill, no one’s ever figured out a conclusive way to extinguish the subterranean blaze (ample amounts of anthracite coal in the surrounding soil allegedly keep the fire alive).
Concern grew over the years regarding residents’ health and safety. In 1984, Congress threw $42 million at the people of Centralia and told them to get while the gettin’ was good; most complied. Eight years later, Pennsylvania officially condemned every building in the town. The final nail in the coffin seemed to come in 2002, when the U.S. Postal Service revoked Centralia’s zip code (17927, never forget).
Meanwhile, the four hundred acre fire continues to burn, apparently not a concern of the nine people who have decided to remain in Centralia until the bitter end. Some of these folk believe the whole fire scare is a merely a hoax perpetrated by the state of Pennsylvania to gain the mineral rights to all that precious anthracite coal. I’m not a big conspiracy nut, but I wouldn’t put anything past the Powers That Be in Pennsylvania. These are the same people who built a cottage industry around a weather-predicting groundhog.
I heard about Centralia via a friend’s blog a couple of months ago. The Wikipedia page certainly piqued my interest; at the bottom of that, I came across this link to a documentary about the fire. The trailer makes Centralia look pretty goddamn dangerous. Smoke rising up from every open orifice in the ground. Decaying wildlife, cracked pavement. Naturally, I was totally jazzed to go check it out. I tossed the idea out to a few friends who were similarly intrigued. We finally got our act together this past Sunday, trekking three hours west of Brooklyn to brave the condemned wasteland of Centralia.
Talk about the let down of the century. We rolled up expecting to see a bunch of rotting houses a la Dodge City enveloped by a thick, smoky haze and tons of roadblocks/warning signs; what we got was a small stretch of nondescript road with a couple of normal-looking buildings and a landfill/quarry where most of Centralia used to be. Substituting for the giant plumes of smoke we thought would be obstructing our view of the horizon were two dinky sputters that looked like dying brush fires. The only sign we spotted regarding anything dangerous was homemade. It was a piece of balsa emblazoned with the word “FIRE” in red spray paint and a crude arrow drawn beneath it. Like, “Yep, the fire is right here, folks!”
A few bikers were hanging around when we got there. They had nothing to say beyond, “Yeah, this is where Centralia used to be. All the houses and stuff were knocked down a few years ago.” We stood around with disappointment on our faces, probably looking like a bunch of dumb city slickers. Where was the burnt out general store? Where was the rusty playground? Where were all the abandoned cars and blinking stop lights and armies of stray cats? Hell, there wasn’t even one crazed, cackling old person swaying back and forth in a rocking chair. All we got was a bench, a graveyard, a pile of tires, and four surprisingly cordial bikers.
This was no great American ghost town. It was just a place where a bunch of stuff used to be. On top of that, the fire was weaker than a movie theater hot dog. Just a few puffs of smoke. The ground didn’t even feel hot. Does this mean the fire might finally be dying out? Who the hell knows. Maybe the conspiracy theorists are right. Maybe there never was a fire. Maybe it was all a lie. Maybe I should track down the makers of The Town That Was and find out what kind of fog machine they used to produce all the smoke seen in their trailer.
So, my friends, unless you find yourself in the neighboring towns of Ashland or Shenandoah with absolutely nothing to do, you can cross Centralia off your list of Crazy Weird Places To Visit In The U.S. of A. I give the whole experience a D minus. The only positive was driving through the Delaware Water Gap, which I personally found quite beautiful.
