May 27, 1962.
40.8033° N, 76.3417° W

The first two mines near Centralia, Pennsylvania, opened in 1856. Locust Run and Coal Ridge, both sunk into the anthracite seam that ran beneath the hills of Columbia County. More collieries followed: Hazeldell in 1860, the Centralia Mine in 1862, the Continental in 1863. The Lehigh and Mahanoy Railroad pushed into the valley in 1865 to carry the coal east. The borough was incorporated the following year, and by 1890 the federal census counted 2,761 residents. Centralia had seven churches, five hotels, and twenty-seven saloons. The streets ran in a grid up the hillside. The houses were wood-frame, close together, many of them built by the mining companies for their workers.

Anthracite production in Pennsylvania peaked around the First World War and fell steadily after. The crash of 1929 closed five Lehigh Valley Coal Company mines in the Centralia area. The population dropped with each census: fewer than two thousand by 1950, 1,435 by 1960. Rail service ended in 1966. The tracks were pulled up the following year. St. Ignatius Church still filled on Sundays. The borough still operated its own school district. But the last of the deep mines had closed.

The mines above ground were closed. The ones underground remained. Beneath the borough, tunnels ran at different depths for miles, crossing and connecting through coal seams and gangways. Some had been sealed when they closed. Most had not. Bootleg miners had worked the abandoned shafts through the Depression and after, pulling coal from the support pillars that held up the ceilings and collapsing whole passages behind them. The result was miles of hollow, coal-lined chambers connected by fissures and gaps that no one had fully mapped. The primary seam was the Buck Mountain bed, a thick vein of anthracite. When it burned, it could sustain temperatures exceeding a thousand degrees Fahrenheit in the sealed chambers below.

In early 1962, the borough council turned its attention to garbage. Eight illegal dumps were scattered around town. New state regulations had forced the closure of an older dump near St. Ignatius Cemetery, and the council needed a replacement. They designated an abandoned strip mine pit near Odd Fellows Cemetery as the new municipal landfill. The pit was roughly 300 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 50 feet deep.

A state landfill inspector named George Segaritus visited the site. He found holes in the pit walls and floor. In the anthracite region, strip mines often cut through older deep mines underneath, and Segaritus recognized what that meant. He told Joseph Tighe, a Centralia councilman, that every opening into the old workings had to be filled with incombustible material before the pit could safely be used. Pennsylvania had required permits and regular inspections for any landfill operating in a former strip mine since 1956.

The holes were not filled.

On May 7, 1962, the borough council met to discuss the approaching Memorial Day. The cleanup of the new landfill was on the agenda. The council hired five members of the volunteer fire company to do the work. Council minutes from the meeting do not describe the proposed method. The method, as in prior years at the old dump, was to set the trash on fire and let it burn down. State law prohibited open burning at dump sites.

On May 27, the firefighters lit the dump. That evening, they doused the visible flames with water. Two days later, the fire came back. Hoses were run from Locust Avenue and the flames were doused again. On June 4, another flare-up. The fire company returned with hoses and a bulldozer, turning over layers of garbage to get at the burning material underneath.

Days later, workers found a hole in the base of the pit's north wall. It was fifteen feet wide. Garbage had been concealing it. No one had sealed it with anything. It opened directly into the abandoned mine workings beneath the town.

The fire was already underground.

By early July, Monsignor William J. Burke at St. Ignatius Church was complaining that foul odors from the smoldering pit were reaching the parish. The council continued to allow dumping in the landfill.

Clarence Kashner, president of the local miners' union, inspected the site and called Gordon Smith, a state mining engineer. Smith said he could dig out the smoldering material with a steam shovel for $175. Art Joyce, a mine inspector from nearby Mount Carmel, arrived with gas detection equipment and tested the gases seeping from the pit wall. The readings confirmed carbon monoxide at concentrations consistent with a coal mine fire.

The borough council wrote to the Lehigh Valley Coal Company. The letter described the situation as "a fire of unknown origin on or about June 25, 1962, during a period of unusually hot weather." It made no mention of the dump burning. A local strip mine operator named Alonzo Sanchez offered to excavate the fire at no cost, in exchange for any coal he recovered. His proposal included exploratory drilling to find the fire's boundaries. The borough rejected the offer.

By August, state mine inspectors were checking Centralia's tunnels daily. On August 9, they found lethal carbon monoxide levels. Every mine in the area was closed the next day.

The state hired Bridy, Inc. to dig out the fire. The contract was roughly $20,000. Bridy was forbidden from doing any exploratory drilling to find the fire's perimeter. State engineers estimated the fire's extent from where steam was visible at the surface. They did not believe it was large. The original plan called for removing roughly 24,000 cubic yards of material. Bridy was permitted to work only on weekday day shifts, eight hours each. Over the Labor Day weekend, work stopped for five days. The fire moved north and deeper into the coal seam, advancing faster than the shovels could follow. Bridy excavated more than 58,000 cubic yards of earth before the money ran out on October 29.

A second project tried flushing the mine tunnels ahead of the fire with a slurry of crushed rock and water. K&H Excavating won the contract. Winter came early. The water supply lines froze. The rock-grinding machine seized in a blizzard. Funding ran out by March 1963, and the fire had already moved past the flushing line.

The state drew up three larger containment plans. The most thorough would have cost more than $270,000. The cheapest, more than $80,000. None were funded.

For the next fifteen years, the fire spread without effective opposition. The U.S. Bureau of Mines drilled boreholes and took readings. State agencies attempted additional flushing and trenching. Proposals were drawn up and shelved. The combined spending across all government efforts exceeded three million dollars. None of it stopped the fire. The tunnels were too extensive. The connections between them were too numerous. The fire followed the Buck Mountain seam in multiple directions, expanding the network of superheated, gas-filled voids under the borough and into the surrounding hills.

Most of Centralia's remaining residents went on with their lives. Some noticed their basements staying warm through winter without a furnace. Steam drifted from cracks in the road and from fissures at the edges of yards. In winter, wisps of it rose from the ground on the coldest mornings. One resident later recalled harvesting tomatoes at Christmas from a garden warmed by the earth below. Metal vent pipes stood in several locations across the borough, releasing gases from below. Carbon monoxide monitors in homes went off at unpredictable hours.

In 1979, John Coddington, the mayor of Centralia, owned a gas station at the corner of South Street and Locust Avenue. He dipped a measuring stick into one of his underground fuel tanks to check the fuel level. The stick came out warm. He lowered a thermometer into the tank on a string. The gasoline was 172 degrees Fahrenheit.

By 1980, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide were seeping into homes through foundation cracks and through old mine passages that ran beneath houses. Residents reported chronic headaches and dizziness. The state distributed gas monitors to households across the borough. Some families received canaries, the same early-warning system the coal mines had used for decades. Sections of road buckled and split from the heat below. The ground was hot to the touch in places.

On February 14, 1981, a Saturday, state officials were in Centralia to assess conditions. Florence Domboski sent her twelve-year-old son Todd outside to see what the visitors were doing. Todd noticed thin wisps of smoke rising from a grassy spot near a tree. He walked toward it.

The ground gave way. He dropped into a sinkhole four feet across. Below him opened a shaft roughly 150 feet deep, pouring hot steam and gas. Todd grabbed an exposed tree root and held on. His cousin, fourteen-year-old Eric Wolfgang, heard him screaming and pulled him to the surface. Todd came up covered in warm mud. Testing afterward showed the gases from the sinkhole contained lethal concentrations of carbon monoxide. A few minutes more in the shaft would have killed him. The sinkhole remained open afterward, still venting hot gas.

The incident was on the evening news that night and in newspapers across the country the next morning. The state officials who had been in town that day walked to the sinkhole and looked in.

In August 1983, Centralia's remaining residents voted overwhelmingly to relocate. In 1983, Congress allocated $42 million for the effort. Most families accepted the buyouts. More than a thousand people moved out. More than five hundred structures were demolished. By 1990, the census counted 63 residents.

In 1992, Governor Bob Casey invoked eminent domain on every property in the borough. In 2002, the U.S. Postal Service revoked Centralia's ZIP code. In 2009, Governor Ed Rendell began formal eviction of the remaining holdouts. In 2013, the last residents reached an agreement with the state: they could stay in their homes until they died.

No criminal charges were filed.

The fire spread south under the neighboring village of Byrnesville. Byrnesville was also abandoned and leveled. Pennsylvania Route 61 through Centralia was closed after the pavement buckled and split from the heat below. The bypass became the permanent road. The abandoned stretch became known as the Graffiti Highway, its surface cracked open and painted over by visitors for decades, until the property owners buried it under dirt in 2020.

The 2020 census counted five residents in Centralia. The fire is still burning. At its current rate, it could continue for another 250 years.

Todd Domboski, the boy pulled from the sinkhole on Valentine's Day, died on February 4, 2022, in Altoona. He was 53.