In December 1983, Congress set aside $42 million to help a whole Pennsylvania town move away from a fire it couldn’t put out. By the time the 2020 Census rolled around, Centralia counted exactly five people.
The fire started under the ground in 1962. It probably began in May of that year, when sanitation workers burned trash at a site over an old mine entrance just outside town, igniting the coal below, according to Smithsonian Magazine. Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection says the fire was first reported on May 27, 1962, and calls the most widely accepted explanation that borough personnel set the trash fire on purpose to cut down on volume and odor before Memorial Day visitors arrived at a nearby cemetery, according to the agency’s Centralia fact sheet.
Whatever the cause, the fire kept going. Smithsonian reports that state officials gave up on trying to extinguish it in the 1980s because the state didn’t have enough money, and that the blaze may burn for another 250 years along an eight-mile stretch of coal.
The danger became impossible to ignore in 1981, when 12-year-old Todd Domboski was crossing a neighbor’s backyard and a hole opened beneath him. He slid into a cloud of gases and saved himself by grabbing a tree root until his cousin pulled him out, per Smithsonian. The incident put national attention on the town, according to Atlas Obscura.
Then came the money. In December 1983, Congress appropriated $42 million to relocate the residents affected by the fire. The major relocation effort began in 1984, and the state says it spent about $41.6 million through 2012. Roughly 1,100 people had once lived in Centralia, and nearly all of them left after receiving federally funded payments for their property.
Not everyone left, however, and the state spent years trying to change that. The Pennsylvania governor at the time, Robert P. Casey, declared eminent domain over the remaining properties in 1992, and the U.S. Postal Service revoked the town’s ZIP code in 2002 “due to a lack of population,” according to the local history site Centralia PA.
The holdouts eventually got a deal. In October 2013, eight remaining residents settled their lawsuit with the state, earning the right to stay in their homes for the rest of their lives along with $349,500 in combined payments, the Associated Press reported. “Everybody got what we wanted and everybody’s happy now,” resident Tom Hynoski, then 52, told the AP. “They bent us, but they didn’t break us.”
By the 2020 Census, only five people were left, making Centralia the least populated municipality in Pennsylvania. The fire, meanwhile, is still burning underneath them, unaffected by the emigration happening above.
If you like stories about places that time left behind, Parade’s roundup of abandoned places in every state has plenty more to explore.
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