Trifter

Blink traveling down Pennsylvania Route 61 and you may very well miss it. The part of town visible from the road has been reduced to a single house, a cemetery, and a very dead tree. Of course, there are also the open pits.

Centralia is a true ghost town in modern times. Across the street from the cemetery is an old tree missing most of its crown which marks the intersection of what was once Wood Street. Below the handmade wooden street sign two more signs are nailed into the tree, arrows, one pointing across Highway 61 to the open pits and the other at a downward angle. They both read “Fire”.

In 1962, local policy was to set the area’s garbage dumps on fire every Memorial Day. In theory, this created more room and drove out the rats. In practice, it was a recipe for disaster. Unbeknownst to anyone, abandoned pit mines in Centralia, now a garbage dump, were closely connected to shaft mines beneath them. When the trash above was ignited, it lit the coal in the bottom of the pit and, in short order, the shaft mines, setting a fire underground. Over the years the fire continued to burn, leaking poisonous gas into the homes of local residents and bursting holes into the surface from below. One by one the people of Centralia left, until one solitary house remained.

Steam and noxious gases still rise from the open pits. The landscape surrounding the fire’s original epicenter is pitted with very small openings. To put your hand in front of one can be uncomfortably warm and the pungent odor of the fire’s byproduct gases is unpleasant to say the least. The haze rising from anthracite dunes in the backdrop of an under-maintained cemetery gives the illusion of a post apocalyptic world, or possibly an outer circle of Dante’s Hell.

The short stretch of Route 61 that winds through Centralia was closed in 1984; fissures in the pavement continuously leak steam and other gases from the earthen furnace below. The road is rerouted now. Most travelers never notice the difference, with new 61 as the main thoroughfare through the late village of Centralia and old 61 reborn as a Graffiti Highway with artwork ranging from deformed phalluses to profound statements such as “Man can make nothing that nature can’t destroy”.

To visit Centralia is to take a glimpse into our own demise. The cause of the fire is hardly an environmental justice issue as are many environmental disasters of this magnitude. It was purely an accident. However, it was a preventable accident. Had not we been exploiting the earth for a high impact and very finite resource, then the fire would never have moved underground. Had humankind been more responsible with fire rather than burning anything that happened to be in the landfill at the time, the catastrophe would have averted.

Its decisions such as these that push us one step closer to extinction. Someday, humankind as we know it is going to come crashing to the ground. And we’ll be the ones pulling it. We’ll pull it down with all of our might.