An Entire American Town Has Been Slowly Burning Alive Underground Since 1962

There's a borough in Pennsylvania where the roads crack open without warning, where carbon monoxide seeps up through the soil, where the ground is warm to the touch even in January, and where the population has dropped from over a thousand people to fewer than five. The zip code was officially revoked by the U.S. Postal Service. The state government condemned the properties and took them through eminent domain. Satellite images show a grid of empty streets leading to lots where houses used to be, surrounded by forest that has slowly reclaimed the land.

This is Centralia. And underneath it, a coal fire has been burning continuously since 1962 — with no realistic prospect of stopping anytime soon.

Geologists estimate it could burn for another 250 years.

How You Accidentally Set a Town on Fire

Centralia sits in the anthracite coal region of Columbia County, Pennsylvania, about 100 miles northwest of Philadelphia. For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was a prosperous little mining town — the kind of place built entirely around the industry beneath it, with a main street, churches, a hotel, and a population that peaked around 2,700 people.

By the early 1960s, the mines had largely played out and the town was smaller and quieter. In May 1962, the Centralia Borough Council hired a crew to clean up the town landfill, which occupied a former strip mine pit at the edge of town. The standard practice at the time was to burn the garbage — a common and broadly accepted method of municipal waste disposal in that era.

The fire was lit. The fire was extinguished — or so everyone believed.

What nobody realized was that the landfill had been placed directly above a network of old mine tunnels connected to an exposed coal seam. The burning garbage ignited the coal. The coal, once lit, found a labyrinth of underground passages through which it could spread almost indefinitely. Attempts to smother the fire in those early weeks failed. By the time anyone understood the full scope of what was happening, the fire was already deep underground and moving outward in multiple directions.

It has not stopped since.

The Long, Slow Abandonment

For the first couple of decades, Centralia residents largely stayed put and hoped the problem would be solved. Various remediation attempts were made — digging trenches, pumping in water and slurry, excavating sections of the burning seam — but the fire kept finding new pathways through the old mine network. The geology of the region, which made it so valuable for coal mining in the first place, also made it nearly impossible to contain a fire once it got going underground.

The situation became impossible to ignore in 1981, when a 12-year-old boy named Todd Domboski was walking through his grandmother's backyard and the ground suddenly gave way beneath him. He fell into a sinkhole roughly four feet wide and 150 feet deep, filled with superheated carbon monoxide gas. He survived only because his cousin grabbed his hand and held on until he could be pulled out.

That incident made national news and accelerated the conversation about what to do with the town.

In 1984, Congress allocated $42 million for a voluntary relocation program. Most residents took the buyout and left. A small number refused. By 1992, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania condemned all properties within the borough and began eminent domain proceedings. A few holdouts fought the condemnation in court and were eventually allowed to remain in their homes for the rest of their natural lives — though the properties will revert to the state when they pass.

As of the most recent counts, fewer than five people still live in Centralia.

What It Looks Like Now

If you visit Centralia today — and people do, because it has become a strange kind of dark tourism destination — the first thing you notice is the silence. The street grid is still partially intact. Some roads are still paved, though many are buckled and cracked, with weeds pushing through the asphalt. Concrete steps lead up to lots where houses once stood. Hydrants still mark the curbs of streets that no longer serve any homes.

In certain spots, smoke rises directly from the ground. Vents installed years ago to help release built-up gases jut from the earth at odd angles. The ground temperature in some areas is warm enough to be felt through the soles of your shoes. In winter, the snow melts unevenly — patches of bare ground surrounded by frost, marking the hot spots below.

The old highway that ran through town — Route 61 — is one of the most photographed spots in the region. A section of it was closed in 1994 after the pavement began cracking and sinking. It's now a crumbling stretch of road covered in graffiti, slowly being reclaimed by the earth on both sides, leading nowhere.

It looks exactly like what it is: a place that lost an argument with what was underneath it.

A Fire Without an End

The reason Centralia's fire cannot be extinguished comes down to a brutal combination of geology, scale, and economics. The burning coal seam extends across an estimated 400 acres and reaches depths of up to 300 feet in places. To fully excavate it would require removing an enormous volume of earth at a cost that experts have estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars — and even that might not work, because the fire has spread through interconnected mine passages that aren't fully mapped.

Water doesn't work at scale. The underground network is too vast and too complex to flood effectively. The fire simply has too much fuel and too much space.

So it burns. It has been burning since the Kennedy administration. It burned through the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Reagan years, the fall of the Soviet Union, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, a global pandemic, and everything since. Barring some intervention that doesn't currently exist, it will burn through events that haven't happened yet — through the rest of our lifetimes and well into the next century.

Centralia is proof that some things, once started, simply cannot be undone. The town made one small, ordinary mistake on an unremarkable afternoon in 1962, and the ground has been paying for it ever since.