In 1962, a fire lit in a Pennsylvania trash pit crept into an abandoned coal seam beneath the town of Centralia — and never went out. Over the next sixty years it swallowed the ground, cracked open steaming fissures in the streets, and reduced a community of 1,000 to a handful of holdouts on land condemned by the government. It is still burning today, and could burn for another 250 years.
A modern on-the-ground documentary walking the cracked, steaming streets of what's left. The best visual introduction to a place that is literally erasing itself.
How a single spark in a landfill reached a labyrinth of abandoned mine tunnels, and every failed, half-funded attempt to put it out before officials simply gave up.
The eerie original PBS documentary, filmed while people still lived there. Watch a town argue about whether the ground under their children is safe — as smoke seeps through the floorboards.
The tipping point came in 1981 when a 12-year-old boy nearly vanished into a sudden sinkhole belching carbon monoxide. Smithsonian tells the human story of the evacuation that followed.
Journeyman Pictures meets the die-hards who refused every buyout and stayed on condemned land — because it was home, fire and all.
The town itself: from a booming anthracite community of thousands to a revoked ZIP code and a population you can count on one hand. The ghost that outlived its own map.
Geographics zooms out: why underground coal fires are almost impossible to extinguish, how many are burning worldwide right now, and why Centralia may outlast everyone reading this.