Centralia, Pennsylvania

So this weekend has had its up and downs, but the major theme throughout has been Centralia, Pennsylvania. We talked about it, watched a documentary about it, and even traveled there, so I figured it'd be appropriate to summarize what we saw and felt.

Road buckling due to underground fire

Centralia, Pennsylvania was a coal-mining town incorporated in 1866. At its height, it claimed more than three thousand residents and was considered a boomtown in East-Central Pennsylvania. In 1962, however, an untended garbage burn ignited the coal beneath the town. Despite attempts to douse the flames, the fire has continued burning to this day, causing various issues for residents, including fissures opening up in random locations and deadly gasses in high concentration emanating from the ground.

One of the first bits of graffiti. Unsettling!

The town, as one might guess, is all but abandoned. The land was condemned and reclaimed by the state in 1992 and the town lost its post office and ZIP code in 2002. Only a few people live there now. The documentary we watched was filmed in 2007 (The Town That Was) and featured prominently one of the town's most fierce advocates, Mr. John Lokitis. In doing a bit of research, however, his own home was demolished in 2009 and he was forced to relocate.

Trees sprout from the middle of the abandoned road

Anyway, we drove around the abandoned streets that we later realized were the local streets of Centralia, roads that had houses up and down them at one point. It was completely unrecognizable as a town at this point - all evidence of human habitation was all but gone save a couple scattered houses and a police office. Even on the office, several letters spelling CENTRALIA were missing as if the ambulance and fire truck still inside were left for dead with the rest of the town.

Maybe not all of the residents moved...

The bulk of our expedition led us to a section of Route 61 that has been closed for several years. After a long time of continually repairing the cracks and buckling of the road caused by the underground mine fire, the state re-routed the road and closed the damaged section. The result was something out of Omega Man, cracked street with bushes and trees growing in the center. The asphalt was split in large fissures in various places, and in others was pushed up to form a three foot hump. The road was exceptionally warm despite the fact that it was an overcast day. In one particularly significant fissure, smoke rose from the underground fire and the heat from below could readily be felt. The alien landscape of Route 61 had graffiti virtually everywhere, as well, with dates and names and crude designs scrawled onto the abandoned road. If that were missing and you took a stroll down the abandoned road, you could very well feel as if you were the last humans on earth scrounging for food or shelter.

The largest fissure in the road, dubbed "the smoking crack"

Centralia still holds a couple cemeteries that people regularly return to in order to honor the dead of their town, despite the fact that they've moved on to safer territories. In 2016 it is speculated that many of them will return for the opening of a time capsule buried for the town's centennial. If at all possible and if I still live in the area, I think it'd make a wonderful trip to see this ceremony. It would be the least of effort to let all the people displaced from their hometown that they - and their plight - have not been forgotten.