Pictures: Centralia Mine Fire, at 50, Still Burns With Meaning

Hot Asphalt

Photograph by Don Emmert, AFP/Getty Images

Vapors hover over a gash that has formed in a closed section of Pennsylvania Route 61, at one time the main north-south corridor through Centralia.

Once a boom town, like contemporary hamlets in the North Dakota oil patch, Centralia straddles vast anthracite coal reserves. Anthracite, the "hard" coal found in the United States only in northeastern Pennsylvania, fueled the Industrial Revolution. Well into the 20th century, it served as a home-heating source. But unlike bituminous or "soft" coal, which powers electricity plants, anthracite slid into obsolescence by the 1950s, as most consumers switched to home heating oil. Across the anthracite region, mines shuttered, coal companies retreated, and mine fires flared at the abandoned sites. (See related photo gallery: "Scavenging for Charcoal Fuel in the Rubbish of Manila.")

Just before Memorial Day in 1962, a fire broke out at the Centralia town dump, which sat atop an old strip-mining pit. The blaze ignited an exposed coal seam, swept underground into an abandoned coal mine, and advanced toward a residential neighborhood. Efforts to extinguish the fire began too late, and proved ineffective. By the late 1960s, toxic fumes started seeping into nearby homes.

In 1983, Congress appropriated $42 million to relocate Centralia. Many residents moved to nearby towns; some refused, opting to stay in their homes. Ten residents remain in the community today—five in the borough of Centralia and five in adjacent Coyningham Township.

Published January 8, 2013

A Glimpse of Twilight

Photograph by Bill Douthitt, National Geographic

The mine fire scorches a wooded area near Centralia in October 1983, while a full moon glimmers over green rolling hills.

Bill Douthitt, then a graphic designer and photographer at National Geographic, landed in Centralia in early October 1983. For the next day or two, he spoke to residents and took photographs, capturing images for an article about the Susquehanna River region that ran in the magazine in March 1985.

While working in Centralia, Douthitt heard about a spot where the mine fire had punched through the surface, radiating steam and flames. As dusk approached, he drove toward a hillside east of town, parked about 75 yards away, and headed uphill, carrying his camera bag, his Nikon FM2 camera, and a tripod.

Up at the scene, he set up his tripod and waited, seeking the right balance between ambient light and twilight. A sulfur scent hung in the air, the mine fire's rotten-egg aroma.

As he finished the shoot, Douthitt—now a senior editor at the magazine—realized his tennis shoes had partially melted. He was alone. No one knew where he was. And if the ground collapsed beneath him, he'd be dead. "So let's leave," he thought. (Related: "Susquehanna: America's Small-Town River." The full text of this March 1985 story is available with an all-access subscription to National Geographic.)

Published January 8, 2013

Steamed

Photograph by Bill Douthitt, National Geographic

Flanked by vents spewing emissions from the mine fire in October 1983, Mary Lou Gaughan bristled with resentment at the government's failure to put out the blaze.

Mary Lou and her husband, Tony, lived closer to the mine fire than virtually anyone in Centralia. As the combustion surged toward their backyard, they tracked, with mounting frustration, the government's ill-fated efforts to extinguish it. They knew contractors needed to dig out the burning coal and rock, deploying bulldozers and dragline shovels. But officials started late in Centralia—several months after the fire ignited—and never caught up. An experimental project also flopped: an initiative to smother the fire with fly ash, a residue of coal-burning power plants.

Gaughan, now 85, relocated to the nearby town of Ashland in 1993. "Of course, I was a die-hard Centralian," she said recently. "I'm happy now. I wasn't happy when I left."

For Douthitt, this image of a resident surrounded by fumes distilled the town's predicament. "You are always looking for something that would make the point," he said.

Published January 8, 2013

Clouded Future

Photograph by Leif Skoogfors, Corbis

Steam from the Centralia mine fire in 1982 streams skyward, as if pouring from a volcano.

For years, many Centralia residents worried about the possible health consequences of inhaling fumes from the fire. For some who lived near the blaze, gas samples taken by government officials revealed a litany of harrowing possibilities: low levels of oxygen; high levels of carbon dioxide; traces of carbon monoxide. In the early 1980s, several families lived with carbon-monoxide monitors in their homes, set to sound an alarm when readings spiked.

In the Gaughans' neighborhood, residents had reason for concern. According to test results from a federal laboratory, the carbon monoxide level inside the cave-in that Todd Domboski fell into had reached 1,154 parts per million, more than 30 times the federal government's recommended exposure threshold.

State officials still keep tabs on about 40 Centralia boreholes, though not as frequently as they once did, given the borough's population decline.

"We know as long as the fire is burning, the gases coming off have carbon monoxide in it," said Tim Altares, a professional geologist manager in Pennsylvania's Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation.

Published January 8, 2013

Scorched Earth

Photograph by Nicolaus Czarnecki, Zuma Press/Alamy

A ribbon of steam trickles from the ground in Centralia in April 2011.

The Centralia blaze, now burning for more than 50 years, spans about 400 acres, according to Altares, the state official. The fire has spread beyond the borough and may, in some areas, be smoldering a few hundred feet underground. But even he can't forecast the blaze's future, other than to say it could burn for hundreds of years.

And in that fact lies a sobering message, for Centralia and coal-mining regions around the globe. The Centralia blaze is one of about three dozen active mine fires in Pennsylvania, according to Altares. A mine fire in Laurel Run, near Wilkes-Barre, has been burning since 1915, almost twice as long as the one in Centralia.

"The ones that are left are the tough ones, like Centralia," he said. "You address them in a number of different ways, but to actually put them out, that's the hard part."

Published January 8, 2013

India Inferno

Photograph by Chris Stowers, Panos Pictures/Felix Pictures

Children perch atop a smoldering outcrop in Jharia, India, where underground mine fires menace nearby villagers.

As many as 70 coal fires have raged across Jharia, a 450-square-kilometer (174-square-mile) coalfield in northeast India. The first reported blaze ignited in 1916, according to a World Bank study completed in 1996. In that report, investigators said the Jharia blazes could affect the health, safety, and well-being of one million people. (Two of the investigators worked for a Pittsburgh-based U.S. firm, GAI Consultants, Inc., that analyzed the Centralia mine fire in the 1980s.)

Beginning in 1996, officials crafted a $1.4 billion plan to deal with the fires and resettle 90,000 residents, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times last year. That's roughly 90 times the size of Centralia's relocation. "Centralia is nothing, nothing at all, compared to this," said Stanley R. Michalski, a retired project manager at GAI Consultants and principal investigator of the World Bank study. So far, only about 1,150 Jharia families have relocated, according to the Times. Many people are too poor to move, and make a living by illegal mining and scavenging of coal. (See related story: "Coal Power Loses Its Luster in India as Costs Rise.")

Published January 8, 2013

Heated Growth

Photograph by Tim Johnson, MCT/Getty Images

A subterranean fire flickers beneath the rocks in Ruqigou, China, on October 29, 2008, hinting at one of the costs of industrialization. (See related pictures: "Rare Look Inside China's Energy Machine.")

An estimated 60 coal fires have flared across 3,000 miles of northern China, according to a 2008 report published by the McClatchy newspaper chain. "It's one of the catastrophes of the Industrial Revolution," says Glenn B. Stracher, a geology and physics professor at East Georgia State College in Swainsboro, Georgia, and author of two books about coal fires, part of a planned four-volume treatise.

The cumulative atmospheric impact of these infernos, scattered across China and around the globe, remains an open question. Even Stracher, who became interested in coal fires after a visit to Centralia in the early 1990s, can cite only "back-of-the envelope" calculations, performed by other scientists, on the link between coal fire greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. If anyone could develop an accurate way to calculate the carbon dioxide and methane emissions from these uncontrolled fires, "that would be an enormous contribution," he said recently.  "But all we can do at this point is speculate."

Published January 8, 2013

Fire Begets Fire

Photograph by Andrea Booher, FEMA via AP

Smoke from a forest fire, sparked by a long-burning blaze in an abandoned underground coal mine, engulfs a Colorado mountainside in June 2002.

Roughly 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) west of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, a coal mine has smoldered since 1910. No one knows what caused the flare-up inside the South Cañon Number One Mine, according to Stracher, who wrote a 2004 field guide on the colliery fire for the Geological Society of America. But the spread of the underground blaze forced a halt in mining in the early 1950s.

Half a century later, on June 8, 2002, a mine-fire vent ignited dried brush at the surface, on South Canyon's western slope. The fire plowed through the canyon, vaulted the Colorado River, surged across Interstate 70, and swept into a residential area. Police officers, dispatched to evacuate residents, reported seeing flames leaping over their squad cars, according to Glenwood Springs Police Chief Terry Wilson. "It's nothing I want to do again," said Wilson.

The forest fire, known as the Coal Seam Fire, consumed more than 12,000 acres of land and destroyed 29 homes. The South Cañon mine is still burning.

Published January 8, 2013

Powder River Embers

Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic

Rancher Leo Ankney surveys a coal-seam fire flickering on his ranch in 2005, near the bank of the Tongue River in Wyoming.

Ankney's ranch sits in the Powder River basin, a 56,000-square-kilometer (21,621-square-mile) area spanning northeast Wyoming and southeast Montana. This region—roughly four times the size of Connecticut—yields more coal than any other in the United States, according to a team study led by Mark Engle, a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. The report was published last year in Science of the Total Environment.

Throughout the basin, outcrops of red rock, known as clinker, stand as geologic evidence of prehistoric coal fires.

More recently, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has logged 81 historic and active coal fires in the basin.

The blazes smolder in abandoned mines, coal seams, and coal-refuse heaps, known as spoil piles. Engle's report, which studied three Powder River Basin coal fires, cites a range of causes for blazes in the area, including lightning strikes, forest fires, arson, carelessness, spontaneous combustion, abandoned mine fires, and blazes in and around active surface mines.

Published January 8, 2013

Next: Pictures: A Rare Look Inside China's Energy Machine

Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images

Published January 8, 2013