Centralia, PA

Centralia was an amazing place. It was terribly sad to see all the vacant house lots, with driveways, carports, and front steps leading to nowhere, and cut power lines gridding a town that is largely absent. The once thriving coal town of 1900+ residents has shrunk to six houses, and most of those are clinging together in one area with actively burning fire a few hundred yards away on a hillside. The Russian Orthodox church above town is still there, and well maintained. We had wanted to see inside, but it was locked up securely, so we contented ourselves with wandering around it. Our reward for the effort was some very ripe blackberries on the grounds behind the church.

The section of Route 61 that was closed was fairly easy to find, and was blocked off by a mound of earth. It wasn't all that effective a barrier as there were tire marks on it, and someone had laid rubber on the abandoned section of road on the other side. There was a lot of graffiti on the road, including two different sections announcing we were on the highway to hell, and another spot announcing that so-and-so had peed there. That one was pretty funny, and I noticed that none of my kids would walk on the long gone urine. As we walked a half mile up the road the pavement became noticeably warmer beneath our feet and began to heave and buckle upwards. At spots, the heaving was close to four feet high. At the worst section of damage, there were many cracks and fissures in the roadway, with the longest being about 50 feet long and 3-4 feet deep. Smoke poured from the largest crack--given that it was 90 degrees that day, I would imagine the smoke and steam must be something to see when its cooler and raining. We had a nice video clip of my son exploring the largest crack, but it was inadvertantly deleted from the camera. We will have to go back in October when Tacincala has parent's week at her school and reshoot that video, since it was something to see. Back in town the roads are covered with asphalt patches that are repairing large holes that have subsided from the coal beneath them burning away. A local woman told me that back in 1961 three boys were playing in the then new landfill site, setting small fires. They were called to dinner and thought they had extinguished their fire, but as history showed, it was still live and burnt down through the rubbish until it hit a fifteen foot crack beneath the landfill which hadn't been filled with noncombustible barrier. From there it found its way to an undergound mine shaft and on into the rich coal seams underlying Centralia. Those three boys, now men, must feel horrible to this day, since their afternoon of play directly led to the essential demise of thier town.