Daily MOS: Centralia’s Inferno

When you think of uninhabitable places on Earth, some big disastrous events come to mind. However, we have simpler ways to permanently fuck the planet than a nuclear accident or deadly chemicals.A fire will do just fine.

Today’s long requested Moment of Science… The eternal flame of Centralia, Pennsylvania.

Slow combustion is a flameless, smouldering process that’s sustained from its own heat as the fuel’s surface reacts with oxygen. Anytime you’ve burned charcoal for the grill (which, to be clear, is not the same material as coal), you’ve witnessed slow combustion. When you add lighter fluid to those briquettes, the brief violent dance of flame is a rapid and complete combustion of the lighter fluid. It provides a blast of initial heat needed to start the burn, and from there fuel that undergoes slow combustion burns for a long time at a low temperature.

So, the Mouth of Hell.

In the 1840s, large deposits of coal were discovered in Centralia, PA. It turned the town into a stable little mining community with a population of about 1,500 people by the 1960s.

To this day, nobody knows exactly how the fire started.

The main theory is that a clean up at the local landfill was the instigating event. And by “clean up” I mean “lighting their garbage on fucking fire.” Whatever the cause, in late May of 1962, the cavernous underbelly of Centralia began its long smoulder. By August, all the mines in town were closed after they detected lethal carbon monoxide levels.

Credit where credit is due, they didn’t look at the problem and decide “we tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.” Several major projects were undertaken to try to stop the fire, one failing after another. Drilling to get ahead of the fire’s path to block it with non-flammable materials failed. In one attempt, it just allowed more oxygen in to fuel the fire. A harsh winter thwarted one of their excavation attempts, slowing their progress and allowing the fire to get ahead of them. They considered completely flushing the mines with water, by which point they realized the scope of the problem was perhaps beyond help.

Unless you worked in the mines, impact on daily life wasn’t all that noticeable at first. Most residents stayed in town for the next two decades. Though there were continued attempts to fix and manage the fire, residents just went on with their lives. There were signs of issues towards the late 1970s, but a few houses getting tipsy weren’t enough to scare them off. Yet.

In the early 1980s, vents were installed to funnel the noxious fumes away from population centers. Even in controlled settings, there’s no real clean coal. There’s wicked bad coal and slightly less goddamn terrible coal. In addition to carbon dioxide, coal releases sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury, and a bunch of other all natural shit to fuck up your day. “Clean” coal generally means there’s a reduction in the amount of sulfur dioxide released.

The vents didn’t scrub anything, but at least the worst of it was directed away from housing. Then some in town suggested the vents actually helped fuel the fires with oxygen, and they were sealed. That could dampen the fire and keep the fumes away entirely, right?

Smoke started coming up through cracks in the road. Over the last two decades, fire had silently devoured the world beneath the face of Centralia.

In 1981, twelve year old Todd Domboski took one wrong step, falling into an eighty foot sinkhole. He fortunately survived thanks to a cousin who yanked him out of there. The event prompted some daring soul to suggest, “maybe dropping our middle schoolers into fiery pits of death is bad,” marking the beginning of the end of Centralia.

A relocation package of $42 million was disbursed to help relocate people from the condemned town. As of most recent reporting in 2020, there remain eight residents in Centralia. Which seems like eight too many people happy to live in a place where the ground is spewing flaming sharts at you.

Centralia is only one of approximately forty active coal mining fires in Pennsylvania.

This has been your daily Moment of Science, reminding you to check that your fire extinguishers are up to date.

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image source: history.com

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