Centralia, once a thriving coal town, was abandoned after a fire began beneath its streets/ AI illustration
An American town has been burning underground for more than 60 years. Once a thriving coal community, Centralia, Pennsylvania was slowly erased from the map, its streets abandoned, homes demolished, and a once-bustling town left smouldering beneath a relentless underground fire.
A town built on coal
For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Centralia, Pennsylvania was an archetypal anthracite town. The settlement began in 1811 as a small community known as Bull’s Head, later renamed Centreville, before coal was first mined in the area in the 1840s. By the time Centralia Borough was formally incorporated in 1866, mining had become the backbone of local life. By the late 19th century, Centralia had developed into a busy town with shops, churches and social halls, sustained by a close-knit community built around the collieries that ran beneath it. By 1890, more than 2,700 people lived there, most tied directly or indirectly to the mines that shaped everyday life.The central role of mining also drew Centralia into the labour conflicts that defined the coalfields. In the 1860s, the town became associated with the infamous Molly Maguires, an Irish secret society linked to labour unrest and violence. Despite downturns, including the Great Depression, which forced many mines to close and dealt a heavy blow to the coal industry, Centralia persevered. Even as economic hardship crippled mining communities across the region, the town endured. What ultimately destroyed it was not economic collapse, but fire.
How the fire began
The blaze that doomed Centralia is generally traced to May 1962, when local authorities attempted to clean up a municipal rubbish dump ahead of Memorial Day celebrations. The landfill sat inside an abandoned strip pit, roughly 75 feet wide and 50 feet deep, left behind after surface mining in the 1930s. Setting rubbish alight was not unusual at the time. As historian David DeKok later wrote in Fire Underground, Centralia Council’s method for clearing dumps was simply to burn them. What officials did not fully account for was the pit’s connection to a vast network of abandoned underground coal workings. It is believed the trash fire breached a poorly constructed barrier, igniting carbon-rich refuse and spreading into the Buck Mountain coal seam below. Once the fire reached the mines, it became almost impossible to contain.
A fire no one could stop
Coal seam fires are among the hardest industrial disasters to contain, and Centralia proved a worst-case scenario. By the time officials understood what they were dealing with, the blaze had already reached a vast lattice of abandoned mine workings beneath the town — tunnels dug over decades, many unmapped, all capable of feeding the fire with fresh oxygen.State and federal agencies tried repeatedly to stop it. Crews excavated trenches in an attempt to cut off the fire’s advance. They pumped water and fire-retardant slurry into the mines, sealed shafts, and dug isolation barriers meant to starve the flames. By the early 1980s, Pennsylvania had spent more than $7 million on suppression efforts. None worked. The sheer number of interconnected tunnels made it impossible to determine which passages were sustaining the fire, let alone seal them all. As the years passed, conditions worsened. Temperatures underground rose to more than 900°F in some locations. Carbon monoxide seeped into homes, forcing the closure of local mines and triggering health complaints from residents. Smoke escaped through fissures and sinkholes, some opening without warning in gardens and backyards.
Hours after plunging into the Earth, Todd Domboski stares at the abyss that briefly swallowed him/ Photograph from AP via National Geographic
In 1981, the danger became undeniable when a 12-year-old boy fell into a sinkhole that suddenly opened beneath his feet, dropping him into a vent connected to the fire below. He survived only because a relative grabbed him in time. By then, homes were cracking, foundations tilting, and the ground itself felt warm to the touch. Journalists wrote that even Centralia’s cemeteries seemed unsafe, with fears that graves were slowly sinking into the burning void beneath the town.
Abandoning Centralia
By the early 1980s, the federal government concluded that saving the town was no longer viable. Instead of extinguishing the fire, Congress approved a buyout of Centralia’s residents, paying families to relocate. Over the following years, homes were demolished and streets emptied. In 1992, Pennsylvania formally condemned all remaining buildings and moved to evict the last holdouts. Centralia’s ZIP code was eliminated. Only a handful of residents were allowed to stay under a court order, on the condition that they could not sell or pass down their property. What remained was a town without a future, sitting above a fire with no end in sight.
Still burning, still dangerous
Today, Centralia is largely uninhabited, but the fire continues. It is one of at least 38 active mine fires in Pennsylvania, and by far the most destructive. The state’s Department of Environmental Protection warns that the blaze could burn for another century if left uncontrolled. The area remains hazardous. Toxic gases can accumulate without warning, and the ground is prone to sudden collapse. Officials strongly discourage visitors from entering the fire zone, warning that serious injury or death is possible.Despite this, Centralia became a magnet for curiosity over the past three decades. The town emerged as an unusual tourist destination, in large part because of the abandoned stretch of Route 61 later dubbed “Graffiti Highway,” which evolved into an unofficial outdoor gallery as visitors and street artists covered it in colorful artwork.
Graffiti Highway before being buried in Centrailia/ Image: Reddit
In 2020, the privately owned road was buried under piles of dirt in an effort to deter crowds during the COVID-19 pandemic, effectively concealing the graffiti
Graffiti Highway/ Credit: AP
From real disaster to cultural myth
Centralia’s eerie landscape has also left its mark on popular culture. The town served as the primary visual and narrative inspiration for the 2006 film Silent Hill, which drew directly on its smoke-filled streets, toxic air and forced abandonment. More than six decades after the fire began, Centralia stands as a stark reminder of how industrial decisions can echo for generations. What started as a routine rubbish burn became an environmental catastrophe that erased an entire town — and continues to burn, quietly and relentlessly, beneath Pennsylvania soil. Go to Source
