Centralia

Centralia is a borough in Pennsylvania that once had a thriving population of over one thousand but today is lucky to have even nine today.

Centralia suffered a fate that's still evident to those that travel to the borough today. The story goes that in the 1960's the local government paid five volunteers of the volunteer fire department to clean up a landfill that was located in an abandoned mine. Usually this was done yearly by setting the landfill on fire then extinguishing it as all the landfill had burned but on one occasion the story says that they did not extinguish the fire.

Over time the fire travelled through the depths of fire and into the empty coal mine below. As coal is very flammable the fire kept burning throughout the 1960's and 1970's. The full scale of the problem was not evident to the locals living in the area until the late 1970's when the local gas owner used a thermometer to check the temperature of the gas and found it to be nearly 80 degrees centigrade.

By 1984 the government had given forty two million dollars to use to buyout locals and relocate them elsewhere, by 1992 the local government condemned all buildings in Centralia.

The fire still rages under the earth over a 1.6km square area and will do so for at least another 250 years as there is no plan to stop it. Today only nine people remain.