A state engineer offered to dig the fire out for a hundred and seventy-five dollars.

May 27, 1962.
40.8009° N, 76.3346° W

Centralia, Pennsylvania, was incorporated as a borough in 1866, built on anthracite. Coal came out of the hills in every direction, and the Lehigh Valley Coal Company had operated mines beneath and around the town for decades. At the borough's peak, in the 1890 census, 2,761 people lived there, and the streets supported seven churches, five hotels, two theaters, a bank, a post office, and more saloons than grocery stores. In 1935, a man named Edward Whitney stripped the coal out of a hillside near the Odd Fellows Cemetery and moved on. What he left behind was a pit about seventy-five feet wide and fifty feet deep, with exposed rock walls and a floor that sat above old mine workings running beneath the town. Nobody filled it in or covered it over. For a while nobody used it for anything. By the early 1960s the big mining operations had closed and roughly 1,100 people remained. The coal had built the town, and when the coal left, the people stayed. They lived in frame houses along a grid of streets, sent their children to the local school, attended the churches, and buried their dead in the cemeteries at the edges of town. There was a volunteer fire company and a borough council. The pit Edward Whitney had left behind became the borough dump.

In 1956, Pennsylvania passed a law requiring permits and regular inspections for any landfill operating in a former strip mine. The state understood the risk. An open pit sitting above old tunnels could funnel a surface fire into the coal seams below. An inspector named George Segaritus, from the Department of Mines and Mineral Industries, examined the Centralia pit and found holes in the walls and floor that connected to the mine workings underneath. He told a borough councilman named Joseph Tighe that the pit would require filling with an incombustible material. The Commonwealth issued a permit. One hole, fifteen feet wide and several feet high, sat near the north wall of the pit. It opened directly into the mine tunnels under the town. Garbage had been thrown over it, hiding it from view. It was never sealed.

Memorial Day weekend was coming in the spring of 1962, and the Centralia Borough Council wanted the dump cleaned up before the holiday. Members of the volunteer fire company were hired to do the job. The method was fire: set the trash ablaze and burn it down to ash. Pennsylvania law prohibited open burning at landfill sites in strip mines. The council had done this before. It was how small boroughs managed their dumps, legal or not. On May 27, 1962, the trash was lit. That evening, men poured water on the visible flames. The surface fire appeared to go out.

Two days later, flames appeared in the pit again. More water. On June 4, the Centralia Fire Company arrived with hoses and doused the pit once more. Each time the surface looked dead. But the fire had already done what the inspector's warning was meant to prevent. It had found the unsealed hole near the north wall, the one hidden under garbage, and burned through it and entered the mine tunnels underneath. The Buck Mountain coal seam ran beneath the streets and houses of Centralia. The fire was no longer in the pit. It was in the ground.

A state mining engineer named Gordon Smith, working out of the Pottsville office, examined the fire in its first weeks and offered to bring in a steam shovel and dig the smoldering material out of the entry point for a hundred and seventy-five dollars. A local strip mine operator named Alonzo Sanchez offered to do the same work free of charge in exchange for whatever coal he recovered. Neither offer was accepted. The borough council instead wrote a letter to the Lehigh Valley Coal Company describing a fire "of unknown origin" that had started during "a period of unusually hot weather." The letter did not mention the trash burn. It made no reference to the dump. It said nothing of the fifteen-foot hole that a state inspector had flagged and that nobody had sealed. It would be twenty-one years before anyone calculated what the fire would cost to put out.

On August 9, 1962, carbon monoxide was detected in the mines near Centralia. The mines were permanently closed. Clarence Kashner, president of a local mine workers' union, told the Shamokin News-Dispatch that 203 miners were idle and 27 mines had been curtailed. The fire had been burning for less than three months, and already the mines that had sustained the town for a century were closed for good. Even as the landfill continued to smolder, the borough council continued to allow dumping in the pit.

In those first months the fire had entered the mine workings through a single opening and had not yet spread far from it. A trench or an excavation around the burning section might have contained it. Each proposal required funding from state or federal agencies, and the funding did not come. The amounts discussed were small, tens of thousands of dollars. They were not approved.

Between 1962 and 1978, state and federal agencies spent $3.3 million trying to contain or extinguish the fire. Projects would begin, run through their budgets, and stop. Boreholes were drilled to map the fire's path. Trenches were dug to cut it off. Each time, funding ran out before the work was finished, and the fire burned past whatever barrier had been started. Now it was moving through the Buck Mountain coal seam beneath the borough, slowly, year after year, spreading outward and downward from the entry point near the Odd Fellows Cemetery. In the homes above the advancing burn zone, things began to change. Basement walls grew warm to the touch. Vegetation in yards and gardens wilted and died in soil that should have supported it. Gas monitors installed in some homes registered carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide at concentrations nobody had warned the residents to expect. The air near certain streets carried the taste of sulfur.

In 1979, a gas station owner and the borough's mayor, John Coddington, lowered a thermometer into his underground fuel tank to check the temperature of his stored gasoline. The reading came back at a hundred and seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. The fuel sat in a steel tank beneath the pumps where customers filled their cars. Coddington reported the reading to state officials. His station sat over the front of the fire.

The men from the testing program were released, or transferred, or went back to their old neighborhoods. Some had scars. Some reported rashes, discoloration, and other problems that stayed with them for years. Nobody followed up on most of them. There were no long-term health checks and no records given to them. Many could not say what had been tested on them because nobody had told them.

The country’s view of human experiments began to change in the early 1970s. In July 1972 the Associated Press reported on the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which the U.S. Public Health Service had watched hundreds of Black men go untreated for syphilis for forty years. The public reaction was immediate. Congress held hearings on human experimentation. Prison research came under the spotlight with it.

In 1971, before most of that broke, a young man named Allen Hornblum started working at Holmesburg in an adult literacy program. He noticed inmates walking around with patches of gauze and tape on their backs and arms. He asked what they were. The answers stayed with him for decades.

In 1974 the testing program at Holmesburg was shut down. The national rules that followed in the 1970s made research on prisoners much harder to conduct. The federal commission set up after Tuskegee looked at prisoners in particular and concluded that men in confinement could not freely agree to be experimented on in the same way as people on the outside.

Kligman continued his career at Penn. Retin-A remained a commercial success. He kept publishing and teaching for decades and was honored by professional groups in his field.

Hornblum spent years tracking down former inmates and digging through records. In 1998 he published Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison, taking its title from Kligman’s own words. It was the first detailed public account of what had gone on inside the walls.

Holmesburg Prison closed in the mid-1990s. The building stayed standing behind its walls in Northeast Philadelphia.

In 2000, a large group of former inmates sued the University of Pennsylvania, Kligman, and several companies that had paid for testing. The case was dismissed because the statute of limitations had run out. The court did not reach the question of what had been done to the men.

No criminal charges were ever filed in connection with the Holmesburg experiments.

Albert Kligman died in 2010. His obituaries led with Retin-A.

In 2021, the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school issued a formal apology for the experiments at Holmesburg On February 14, 1981, a twelve-year-old boy named Todd Domboski was in his grandmother's backyard in Centralia. The ground beneath him gave way without warning. He dropped into a sinkhole about four feet wide that had opened in the earth where he had been standing. Below him the cavity went down roughly a hundred and fifty feet into the old mine workings, and the air inside it carried carbon monoxide at concentrations high enough to kill. Domboski caught a tree root on the way down and held on. His older cousin, Eric Wolfgang, was nearby. Wolfgang reached over the edge of the hole and pulled him out.

By coincidence, a state representative, a state senator, and a mine safety director happened to be walking through the neighborhood at the time of the collapse. They were conducting an inspection of the affected streets. They saw the hole. The sinkhole had opened in a residential backyard, on a winter afternoon, and a child had nearly fallen a hundred and fifty feet into a mine shaft filled with lethal gas. A few feet deeper and he would not have survived. The incident was covered on evening newscasts and in newspapers across the state and then across the country. It was raised in congressional hearings. For nineteen years the fire had been spreading beneath Centralia while state and federal agencies drilled boreholes, dug trenches, ran out of money, and stopped. Two years later, the federal government finished its calculation.

In 1983, the federal Office of Surface Mining completed a study. The estimated cost to excavate the fire and put it out was $663 million. The federal government announced that the fire would be allowed to burn. It would not be dug out or smothered. In December of that year, Congress appropriated $42 million to move the people who lived above it. Residents would be offered a buyout. They could take the money and leave Centralia, or they could stay in a town where the ground was hot, the air carried poison, and the earth could open beneath them at any time. The relocation was voluntary. Most of the town took it.

Most of the residents accepted the buyout and moved to the nearby communities of Mount Carmel and Ashland. The houses they left behind were demolished.

In 1992, Governor Bob Casey invoked eminent domain on all remaining properties in the borough. In 1993, Route 61 south of Centralia was closed after the fire damaged the road surface; a bypass was built around the affected stretch. In 2002, the United States Postal Service revoked Centralia's ZIP code, 17927.

In 2009, Governor Ed Rendell began formal eviction of the remaining residents. In 2013, state officials reached an agreement with the seven people who had refused to leave. Each was granted a life estate. When each one dies, the property reverts to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

No criminal charges were filed against anyone for starting the fire or for failing to put it out.

The 2020 census counted five residents. The fire burns at depths of up to three hundred feet, across roughly 3,700 acres. Engineers estimate it has enough coal to burn for another two hundred and fifty years. By some estimates, fifty thousand dollars would have stopped it in 1962. for the harm done to the men who took part. It removed Kligman’s name from an endowed professorship and a lecture that had been named in his honor.

The apology came forty-seven years after the program ended. Many of the men it was addressed to were dead.

The stone walls of Holmesburg are still there.