A fire that will not stop.
The Everlasting Fire
By Phill Senters
In 1841 a man named Johnathan Faust opened the Bull’s Head Tavern in a growing little borough in Columbia County, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t much of a town until 1865 when a civil and mining engineer named Alexander W. Rea moved in. He laid out the streets and lots, and they called the little borough Centreville until 1865 when they got a post office and the name was changed to Centralia.
The little town grew and prospered because of the coal which is so plentiful in the area. At one time the little mining town proudly boasted 2,761 citizens, and as many as seven churches. Centralia was a great place to live and work thanks to the coal mining industry.
There are coal mines every where around the area, and the town used to burn the garbage once weekly in one of the old abandoned mines. In 1962 a vein of coal caught fire during the weekly burning, and all efforts to stop the fire proved unsuccessful. The underground fire raged on unabated throughout the 1960s and 70s while the people lived above it, unaware of the real danger.
Some of the citizen’s began suffering poor health because of the carbon monoxide produced by the burning coal, and in 1979, at a gas station they discovered that the temperature of the fuel in the storage tanks was much higher than normal.
In 1984, it cost $42 million dollars to relocate most of the residents to the nearby Mount Carmel and Ashland. In 1992, the state of Pennsylvania condemned all the houses in the town, leaving less than a dozen people living there. Centralia is all but a ghost town now.
All photos from Creativecommons
The fire still burns to this day, and the experts say that it could burn for another 250 years. If that’s not an everlasting fire, I think it’s close enough.
If you’d like to read more about Centralia and the fire, here are some links:
You can find more history of Centralia here: http://www.centraliapa.com/historytwp.htm
Google images of Centralia:
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&um=1&sa=1&q=+Centralia%2C+Penn&btnG=Search+images&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g1&start=0
Another story and more pictures:
http://www.offroaders.com/album/centralia/centralia.htm
very “hot” topic phil..never experience like this..even that I’m always doing my job as coal quality inspection surveyor at mining..Thanks for sharing. 
Welcome to Authspot, the spot for creative writing.
Read some stories and poems, and be sure to subscribe to our feed!
