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  The Federal Government has condemned the town of Centralia

   Imagine what it would be like to live in a town that had been condemned by the government. Imagine open fissures in the ground spewing up toxic carbon monoxide poison. Now, imagine how you would feel to know that as you walk down the street, the ground under your feet could collapse which could cause you to fall into a fiery pit where you would be incinerated.

  For the handful of people living in Centralia, Pennsylvania, this is a typical day. Centralia is a ghost town that was mostly abandoned by a majority of its residents who gradually left the town after a fire was ignited in the vast coal reserves that lie underneath it in 1962.

 Centralia is located in Columbia County and sits atop a vast deposit of coal. In 1962, the Centralia Borough Council hired five members of the volunteer fire company to clean up the town landfill, located in an abandoned strip-mine pit next to the Odd Fellows Cemetery. This had been done prior to Memorial Day in previous years, when the landfill was in a different location. On May 27, 1962, the firefighters, as they had in the past, set the dump on fire and let it burn for some time. Unlike in previous years, however, the fire was not fully extinguished. An unsealed opening in the pit allowed the fire to enter the labyrinth of abandoned coal mines beneath the town.

  The fire spread rapidly through the maze of mines and later became the topic of a book by David Dekok author of “Unseen Danger: A Tragedy of People, Government, and the Centralia Mine Fire.” DeKok describes the subterranean raging inferno as  “A world where no human could live, hotter than the planet Mercury, its atmosphere as poisonous as Saturn's.  At the heart of the fire, temperatures easily exceeded 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Lethal clouds of carbon monoxide and other gases swirled through the rock chambers.” 

  Efforts to extinguish the underground fire proved futile and the fire has now burned for 50 years. A seemingly endless supply of coal under the ground could burn for years to come.

   As the fire burned the residents went about their day-to-day lives. The fire was underground and thought to be of no threat to the citizens. As the fire continued to burn and the ground under the town grew more unstable, the Federal Government intervened and began claiming homes under imminent domain in 1992. The home owners were compensated for their properties and relocated to other towns.  All buildings in the town were condemned. Centralia's ZIP code was revoked by the Postal Service in 2002.

    Today, a few buildings remain. The factories where products were once manufactured sit idle. The school yard where children once played is silent. The local stores sit undisturbed years after the final sales were rung up. The local town hall sits eerily silent years after the last mayor and town officials locked the doors for the final time. The fire engines sit in the bay of the fire station useless to halt the raging inferno that lies beneath and threatens the town. The searing heat from beneath the streets, have caused the pavement and asphalt to crack and fissures have emerged spewing toxic gas into the air. The roads are now unsafe to travel and have been closed. The surface ground is now growing dangerously thin and has been known to collapse. Still. Despite these living conditions, the town is not completely abandoned.

   Today only 10 steadfast residents remain of what was once a town of 2,700. Despite perilous living conditions these steadfast residents refuse to leave the town they have called home. The federal government has demolished most of the remaining public buildings and houses. These stubborn Centralians who remain now must drive to neighboring towns to get supplies and other necessities on the roads that have begun to collapse.

  Time will tell if these residents will bow to government pressure to leave or if the fire will burn out or consume what little remains of the town. 

    Michael Williams has written a book entitled "Stranger than Fiction: The Lincoln Curse." The book is a collection of 50 strange and unusual but true stories. The stories will leave the reader convinced that perhaps Mark Twain was right when he said "truth is stranger than fiction."

    Williams has written for more than 30 newspapers and magazines including the Civil War Times Illustrated, The Civil War Courier, the Associated Press and the Knoxville Journal.

     The book is 187 pages in a softbound edition with numerous photos. The book can be purchased from amazon.com for $19.95 plus shipping and handling or you can save shipping cost and save $2 on the purchase price by ordering a signed copy directly from the author. Send $17.95 to P.O. Box 6421 Sevierville, TN. 37864.

    The book is available in Kindle on Amazon.com for $3.99. For more information visit the website www.strangerthanfictionnews.com.

The air around Centralia is becoming toxic and the roads are beginning to collapse.