Discover - July/August 2010

burn, and a month later bulldozers arrived for a more concerted effort to put it out. The citizens then discovered that the dump contained a 15- foot-long opening that connected to a maze of underground mine tunnels. These passages allowed the ;re to spread to the coal seam underneath the town and expand along four fronts, eventually affecting a surface area about two miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide.

Since then, around $4 million has been spent to put the Centralia ;re out, to no avail. It continues to burn today, moving through a vast network of abandoned mines that are still littered and lined with coal. No one knows how extensive these empty spaces are, and the effort to quell the blaze has come to an end. “It’s too expensive to tackle, and we’re not sure we can do it anyway,” says Alfred Whitehouse, chief of the Reclamation Support Division of the federal Of;ce of Surface Mining.

The town of Centralia is almost completely deserted today. After some residents passed out from carbon monoxide inhalation and another fell into the earth in 1981, when the ground suddenly collapsed—as the coal burns away, the ground above it often subsides into the resulting cavity —Pennsylvania received $42 million from Congress to relocate Centralia’s residents. Folks accepted the buyout one by one, and their homes were demolished to discourage squatters. (Nine holdouts are still ;ghting eviction today.) The town now looks like a giant vacant parking lot. A few intersections still sport stop signs, which spray painters have modi;ed to read “Don’t STOP believing.” Aside from the eerie emptiness, signs of the ;re below are subtle. On a day in January, dead grasses bristle with ice along the edges of long cracks in the earth, and wisps of gas drift here and there. An area the size of a small house recently sank about three feet, and a bright green band of vegetation ;ourishes in the steaming, broken earth around it.

When Stracher first visited Centralia in 1991, the town looked even more like a disaster zone. Stracher had just finished his postdoctoral training in metamorphic petrology;

as a new professor at Bloomsburg
University of Pennsylvania, he went
to Centralia on a geology field trip.
He was horrified by the sinkholes
encased in sulfur and other precipi-
tated minerals, the huge cracks in
now-abandoned Highway 61 near
town, the thick fumes rising from a
ravine called Death Valley, and the
sulfur-laden trees around the ravine.
The town’s Catholic church was still
standing then. Stracher posed for a
photograph next to a mournful sign
outside the church that read, “Centra-
lia: Coal mine ;re is our future.”
“The ;re had been burning so long
by then,” he recalls. “I wondered what
long-term effect it was having on the
atmosphere and groundwater, even
on people who didn’t live there.”
At that point, Stracher did not know
very much about coal, but he had a
strong background in chemical ther-
modynamics. He decided to study the
behavior of the sulfur coming out of
Centralia’s burning coal. In 1995 he
reported that some of the sulfur crys-
tallized and stayed on the ground,
potentially tainting the local water,
and some of it ;oated away as a gas,
polluting the air. Nine years later, he
and a former student published an
article in the International Journal
of Coal Geology titled “Coal Fires
Burning Out of Control Around the
World: Thermodynamic Recipe for
Environmental Catastrophe.” Over
the next few years, Stracher was
asked to put together symposia,
one for the American Association
for the Advancement of Science and
another for the Geological Society of
America. By that time, coal ;res had
become his life work.