The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town(atlasobscura.com)

85 points by pbshgthm 164 days ago | 42 comments

pkul 158 days ago |

Mildly related: In North Philadelphia there are a few blocks known as the Logan Triangle that were abandoned once it was discovered that the topsoil was not stable.

https://hiddencityphila.org/2022/06/in-limbo-logan-triangle-...

thejarren 158 days ago |

I grew up in Pennsylvania and have visited Centralia a few times over the years. When I was younger, I remember being able to see smoke rise from the ground, but in recent years, I haven’t seen anything almost as if the fire has subsided a bit.

Pennsylvania is filled with old coal mining towns, and most of them are in a state of decay. Towns like Pottsville, Pennsylvania have buildings crumbling down on their main streets.

If anything, I think Centralia is representative of where these other towns could be in 50 to 100 years, assuming people move to larger communities. Barring the fire under the ground, of course.

parpfish 158 days ago | |

I was on a road trip a few months back and took a slight detour to pass through centralia, and there was enough smoke that I could see it from the road. Some local had set up a lawn chair and chained it to a tree so passers-by would know where to stop and take a peek

euroderf 157 days ago | | |

That's my kind of civic-mindedness.

tstrimple 158 days ago | |

It turns out basing entire economies off of resource extraction isn't sustainable. If only we hadn't had to re-experience this over and over again decade after decade. But I'm sure the next Republican candidates will promise more coal jobs so they will continue to be voted for and nothing will substantially change.

jjk166 156 days ago | | |

Pottsville wasn't founded as a mining settlement. It was an industrial hub that built up around the nearby forge purchased by John Potts. It had a large textile industry and still has America's oldest brewery. In addition to industry it's also the local county seat, and it briefly had an NFL franchise. The industry mostly left in the late 20th century but the nearby mining continues - the coal is just sent elsewhere for use.

lloydatkinson 158 days ago | | |

> Pottsville, Pennsylvania

It was founded in 1808. Not exactly sure how they was supposed to know.

saghm 157 days ago | |

> Pennsylvania is filled with old coal mining towns, and most of them are in a state of decay. Towns like Pottsville, Pennsylvania have buildings crumbling down on their main streets

And it's been going on long enough that Billy Joel even had a hit song about one over 40 years ago

pseudohadamard 158 days ago | |

There's some Youtuber who posts videos of driving out to these places and talking to the locals. It's pretty depressing, the closest I've seen to it is isolated towns in immediately post-Soviet eastern Europe, but without the meth problems.

sevenseacat 158 days ago |

I find the story of Centralia fascinating. I read through the entirety of Unseen Danger https://archive.org/details/unseendangertrag0000deko, marvelling how it went from something that could have been handled easily if there had been funding, to something that killed the entire town with heavy doses of politics along the way.

imajoredinecon 158 days ago |

Neat read on the whole, but was fun to see how huge the author believes Estonia is:

> When Estonia, for example, became independent of the Soviet Union, some 245 million square miles of collectivist farmlands were simply abandoned.

orsorna 158 days ago | |

To convert that figure to a more relatable number: the surface area of the Earth is just about 197 million square miles. With such an error I'm having a hard time trusting the article content.

boothby 158 days ago | | |

Technically, if you're measuring surface area, it' important to remember that the earth is not a sphere. There's a bit of a paradox measuring shorelines: the shorter your ruler, the longer it gets, because you're able to capture more complex features. Pethaps the authors took an extremely precise measurement of the surface of Estonia, counting everything down to the sinus cavities of dogs sleeping in alleys...

closewith 158 days ago | |

Common enough error in the US when dealing with square meters abbreviated to sq m. Only off but a factor of 2.6 million.

But yes, it does call into question the rest of the fact checking.

B1FF_PSUVM 158 days ago | | |

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonia Area • Total 45,335 km2 (17,504 sq mi)

Some people are just oblivious to six orders of magnitude mistakes, and then go off about "folly, mistake, calamitous hubris, neglect, and plain stupidity" ...

bryanrasmussen 158 days ago | |

I mean it's sort of hard to believe anything they say.

ejs 158 days ago |

I always thought it was an interesting story, drove out there one day many years ago when I lived nearby. It was a dreary day, which added to the strangeness of the place.

It's an interesting place because it's not that far from other towns, and you can drive right through it on a normal, maintained road. If you turn off and drive just a minute or two it's very different though.

fallingfrog 158 days ago |

I visited Centralia about 20 years ago, I remember that we stopped the car on the way into town because there was a crack going all the way across the road with smoke coming out of it. But we kept walking and found a few abandoned houses and empty streets. We were too intimidated by all the scary signs to wander far off the road but took some pictures on a disposable camera and eventually returned home.

themaninthedark 158 days ago |

I like how the guy who is most grounded in how the government and corporations work is being presented as someone who is inexplicably yearning for the a point in history where things were at their bleakest.

With nary a comment about the intention of the company who is now buying up the land.

>Those that stayed had to go to court to defend their right to live on this abandoned land, all because they wanted to keep the mineral rights to their property. So now, people like Phil assume that the government is just waiting them out. Once they’re gone, putting out the fire will be easy enough. “They’ll take all that red hot coals, but also they’re going to get that rich anthracite coal,” he told us. “And I’m sure they’ll sell that. But are the people or the relatives going to get anything? It’s very doubtful. It’ll probably go to the federal government. Or the coal baron, maybe?”

>His voice, I noticed after a while, has a peculiar kind of nostalgia for the worst times in the world.

>so when coal company Pagnotti Enterprises bought the land in 2018

shmerl 158 days ago |

Burning garbage on top of coal mines is such a bizarre idea. What can go wrong?

zzzeek 158 days ago |

so how do you put that fire out? or was "So now, people like Phil assume that the government is just waiting them out. Once they’re gone, putting out the fire will be easy enough" referring to how the locals think the government is just pretending they can't fix the problem?

John23832 158 days ago | |

You can't. The coal seam is literally smoldering.

themaninthedark 158 days ago | | |

You might be able to, however not easily like when you put out a simple structure fire.

The ground is riddled with small vents that allow oxygen in. If you were to inject a foaming agent and then flood the space you could eventually lower the temperature below the auto ignition temperature.

Might not be easy. Might not be cost effective right now.

But there is a reason that Pagnotti Enterprises bought the land and I doubt it is because they are looking at turning it into a nature reserve.

GuinansEyebrows 157 days ago |

i'm sure there are discussions around this but i wonder if there was any feasible way to harness the energy from the underground fires? turn a horrible situation into a semi-temporary "geothermal" generator!

Vaslo 158 days ago |

The author keeps taking jabs at “capitalism” - but let’s be honest that this could happen in any political/economic system. This cheapens the article.

pfdietz 158 days ago | |

It was done deliberately in the USSR, in a process known as Underground Coal Gasification. Oxygen and steam are injected to convert the coal to syngas (CO + H2) which is brought up to the surface. This allows exploitation of coal deposits that are not suitable for conventional mining.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_coal_gasification

mc32 158 days ago | |

I mean there is this that happened in the USSRS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater so indeed it happens in socialist/communist countries too.

phyzome 158 days ago | |

There's only one explicit reference to capitalism.

Vaslo 158 days ago | | |

Also a comparison to Chernobyl (which no one would ever think they were anywhere near related.). Clearly the author wanted to communicate “something” more than the interesting takeover by nature.

krupan 158 days ago |

"What Flynn makes clear is that while we tend to think of human activity on the landscape as not only damaging but irreversible, this may not always be the case."

SoftTalker 158 days ago | |

This is pretty obvious if you've ever watched what happens to abandoned property over a few years once nobody is maintaining it. First grass and weeds, then brambles, then trees. If it's covered in asphalt or concrete it takes longer but it still happens.

cucumber3732842 158 days ago | | |

It does't happen nearly as fast in the desert.