Centralia PA

Centralia PA

Centralia is a ghost town and borough in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, United States. Its population has dwindled from over 1,000 residents in 1981 to 12 in 2005 and 9 in 2007, as a result of a mine fire burning beneath the borough since 1962. Centralia is now the least-populous municipality in Pennsylvania, with four fewer residents than the borough of SNPJ . This was a place where no human could live, hotter than the planet Mercury, its atmosphere as poisonous as Saturn's. At the heart of the fire, temperatures easily exceeded 1.000 degrees.Lethal clouds of carbon monoxide and other gases swirled through the rock chambers.Anthracite coal was mined in Centralia, Pennsylvania, for more than a hundred years. What we today call the Centralia mine fire is a direct legacy of the environmental devastation of that era and the failure of either government or private industry to face up to the damage that had been done and the risks that remain. Back in 1962, a fire began in a coal vein underneath the town that burns to this day without showing any signs of burning out. As a result, the government used imminent domain laws to buy up the town, move the people out, and raze the buildings. There are fewer than a dozen residents left who stubbornly refuse to move.