Anthracite—“hard coal.” It has the least impurities, most carbon, and highest energy density of all coals. You burn this rock to release its energy. In the United States it is primarily found in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Names of the main counties: Carbon, Columbia, Lackawanna, Luzerne, Northumberland, and Schuylkill. Perhaps a bit of Dauphin.
anthrasilicosis—a lung disease caused by prolonged exposure to coal, otherwise known as black lung. The disease is prevalent in Centralia, Pennsylvania, where coal mining was the dominant occupation until the 1960s.
borough—the proper term for Centralia. It is smaller than a city but still a municipality. The mining of anthracite in the area began in 1842. Shortly thereafter, Centralia was incorporated in February of 1866. The borough’s very existence was tied to the coal from its very founding.
boreholes—tall pipes sticking out of the ground to vent the steam and smoke from underground.
burning dump—A small fire at the municipal waste dump was the theoretical starting cause of the fire in 1962 that soon burned out of control underground. At least that is where the fire was first noticed. The area had been a mining pit but was now abandoned, and although the fire was quickly smothered with shoveled clay and water, it found a new source of energy in a coal vein and descended underground, continuing to burn unseen.
carbon monoxide detector—the boxes brought by the federal government with an ever-spewing readout tape that ticks, ticks, ticks away in the homes of the area. The box shows when the residents’ brains were being deprived of oxygen with the sounding of an alarm. Residents note that this often seems to happen at night. The townspeople would call who they needed to call and wait for windows to be opened and statistics to be listed to lower the dangerous levels of carbon monoxide. Then they would go back into their homes.
Centralia Committee for Human Development—the group created to try to get governmental payouts for houses that were no longer safe for habitation because of the health risks caused by the fire. The group was on one side of the town’s split. The other side included those still hoping that there was another solution that would make their homes safe again and allow their community to continue. It was hard to get any governmental attention, so there were those who began leaving even without monetary support. When they did this, they lost the money they’d put into their homes, which was of course most of their life’s savings, and their empty houses created the feeling of a ghost town. See also Residents to Save the Borough of Centralia.
clay seals—earth that was used to try to cut off the oxygen supply to the fire.
coal—the prominent fuel source in the United States starting in the late nineteenth century, when it surpassed wood. It was used in factories, trains, ships, and commonly to heat homes in the Northeastern region of the country. It was a major component of the industrial revolution. The Lenape, the indigenous people of the region, used it as a fuel source and as a means to create art and historical records of their deeds.
coal veins—the energy-rich seams in the earth that let a fire flourish underground for decades.
dangers of working in the mines—poor ventilation, strenuous labor, long hours, explosions, suffocation, and cave-ins. See also anthrasilicosis.
Department of Environmental Resources; Office of Surface Mining; and Bureau of Mines in the U.S. Department of the Interior—all federal authorities that spent over $7 million dollars from just 1962 to 1984 to put out the fire. They failed. The fire only got worse.
Domboski, Tom—a twelve-year-old resident who on Valentine’s Day in 1981 fell into a hole in his grandmother’s backyard because the ground burned to ash beneath his feet. He screamed as he slowly descended below the grassy yard. Every few seconds the ground below him would further give way. He was only saved because he grabbed onto a tree root and hung on until his cousin pulled him out. Otherwise, he would have disappeared into the steaming earth or been asphyxiated by the toxic carbon monoxide that surrounded him and smelled of sulfur.
excavation—digs that were completed to try to stop the fire.
fly ash—burnt material that was pumped into the tunnels to again try to squelch the fire.
Franklin stove—Exactly a hundred years before mining began in Centralia, Benjamin Franklin created a stove to cut back on the amount of wood necessary because he was concerned about the natural resources available in this burgeoning nation, saying this:
By the Help of this saving Invention, our Wood may grow as fast as we consume it, and our Posterity may warm themselves at a moderate Rate, without being oblig’d to fetch their Fuel over the Atlantick; as, if Pit-Coal should not be here discovered (which is an Uncertainty) they must necessarily do.
He was uncertain whether America would find coal and wanted to make sure that the country could be self-sustaining and not reliant on overseas nations. Coal, as we know, was found in this country, and Centralia, with its rare anthracite, was a prime location for mining.
Lenape origin story—a Lenape story about a tortoise who emerged from the water to create dry land and from his back sprouted two trees that became the foundation of all humanity. Tantaque, a Lenape who told this story in 1679, drew the images on the ground with a piece of coal he took from the fire. Coal is a part of this story, too. It is actually the medium.
macadam—the regional term for roads built with the layering and compacting of crushed stone. It was an approach engineered by John Loudon McAdam.
nine hundred degrees—Ground temperatures have been registered higher than that level in the area above Centralia’s fire.
PA General Assembly Senate Bill 972—the state bill passed in 1983, which the governor signed the following year as Act 229, allowing families to receive a fair market value for their homes and giving the land with its mineral rights back to the state. Some remained and continued to battle in court, especially after they noticed that older residents who left often died shortly after their displacement. Centralia was home, and some knew it was the only place where they could survive even knowing the environmental dangers.
Pagnotti Enterprises—a Pennsylvania-based mining and metal company that bought the land in Centralia from the state in 2018.
pillar-robbing—a method used by bootleg miners to illegally scavenge coals supporting the mineshafts. This method caused cave-ins that made stopping the fire even more difficult.
reforestation—replanting an area with trees.
Residents to Save the Borough of Centralia—This group tried to save the town. Some in this group even doubted the safety risk and thought the payouts might just be a landgrab for profitable coal acreage. Others stayed by choice and by lack of choice, and sometimes a resident was the sole person still living on their block. See also the opposition group Centralia Committee for Human Development.
Route 61—the highway that runs by the town. It is called the Graffiti Highway, since it became a site for spray-painting when the fractures in the asphalt caused by the fire made it too treacherous for driving. Grasses and trees sprout up from the cracked, painted road, which is permanently closed to traffic. Its recent visitors are tourists, high school graduates, and the occasional film crew for an apocalyptic movie.
Silent Hill—a video game series and a 2006 horror movie loosely based on the town’s history. Some of the movie was filmed on the Graffiti Highway.
subsidence—the caving in of the ground, caused by soil giving way to the underground fire.
subterranean—what happens underground, literally, and what is hidden from sight, symbolically.
sulfur—the smell often found in the town and in the pit of hell.
terra incognita—a Latin phrase that means that the land is unknown. While the term is typically used to discuss unexplored territory, in this situation it speaks to how much is still unknown about the land beneath our feet. In April 2020, in order to keep the people away, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, dump trucks covered the portion of Route 61 known as the Graffiti Highway with 8,000 to 10,000 tons of dirt. The land had been purchased from PennDot by Pagnotti Enterprises only two years earlier. It was a four-day process of trucks burying the past. Under the dirt is the spray-painted art, under that is the dilapidated road, and under that is the smoldering coal—all of it now subterranean. The highway will return to the forest. See reforestation.
thermophiles—heat-loving bacteria. Scientists are studying the microscopic life in Centralia because if these hearty, adaptive organisms can survive the heat of the still-burning fire, they represent life that can survive climate change. The future has already arrived in Centralia.
time capsule—In 1966, for Centralia’s centennial memorable items from the town were collected and buried. They were to be dug up fifty years later. They were excavated, however, two years early, in 2014, because of an attempted theft of the objects when it was discovered that water had damaged most of the historical items. One of the few unharmed pieces was a miner’s helmet.
town’s population—At the peak of the coal industry, in 1890, there were over 2,700 residents. In 2020, the census showed that only five people remained. Five hundred homes have been demolished. The town feels like a new-growth forest with small macadamed areas peeking through the overgrowth betraying its past. See reforestation. Those who remain have been given the right to stay until they die, along with a total settlement of $218,000 for their properties. After their deaths, their houses and their land will be claimed by eminent domain. When the final inhabitant of Centralia perishes, so too will the town, even though it’s been dying for decades, even though the land continues to smolder. The coal companies and scientists lurk at its fringes.
zip code 17927—the now defunct mailing code for Centralia, Pennsylvania.
Abby Manzella is the author of Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements. She grew up in Pennsylvania.
