A glimpse of an abandoned town where an underground fire has been burning for 60 years
An underground fire in an American mining town has been raging there and endangering the residents since 1962. Most of them evacuated the town a long time ago, but five still refuse to evacuate today
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08/28/2022
Sunday, August 28, 2022, 00:43
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The Story of Centralia Ghost Town (tiktok@oliviatwistmysteries)
Only brave tourists come to visit the almost completely abandoned but definitely dangerous town of Centralia.
Only five residents remain there and refuse to evacuate, despite the fact that they live on dangerous land and may find themselves in a hot sinkhole at any given moment.
An underground fire in Centralia, once a thriving American mining town, has been raging in the area since 1962, forcing most of its residents to evacuate.
For decades the fire has not been extinguished - and it is doubtful that it will happen soon.
Centralia, in the District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, northeastern USA, was a busy mining town until the events of May 1962 changed its future forever. On National Memorial Day, an arsonist trash fire spread into a maze of coal mines, thousands of feet below the surface. The coal didn't stop from burning and heating the ground, when residents complained of headaches and fainting caused by the large amounts of carbon monoxide that spread in the area. To this day, the fire rages there, 61 years later. Many attempts to extinguish the underground fire have failed and the harmful gases continue to seep from the cracks in the crumbling ground, Which makes the town a dangerous place to live.
This is how she looks:
In 1981, a 15-year-old boy named Todd Dombowski was playing in his backyard when he fell into a sinkhole, which is the product of an underground coal burn.
His cousin rescued him alive from a depth of about 50 meters, but this incident only highlighted the dangers to those remaining above ground, posed by the ongoing fire down there.
In 1983, 200 residents expressed their desire to remain in the town while 345 residents asked to sell the area - and thus the fallout fell on the sale of the land and a total relocation of the residents.
In the following 11 years, the vast majority of residents left the place.
In 1992, the state of Pennsylvania announced that it was confiscating the town, destroying the houses and blocking access to the place.
At the town's peak, in 1890, just over 2,700 people lived there.
As of 2020, only five residents remain.
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The town is mostly left with cracked roads, charred and cracked soil, holes that belch smoke and dying trees.
Signs have been placed around it warning visitors not to approach its dangerous areas.
One resident said in 2017 that those who remain are frustrated by tourists who damage residents' property and walk around on lawns thinking the whole place is deserted.
According to him, they throw waste and spray graffiti around the city.
A section of Route 61 that remains unused leading into the town has become a tourist attraction after being covered in graffiti by visitors.
However, in April 2020, the townspeople tried to discourage tourists by covering the road with soil, after it was reported that the spray had spread to local cemeteries.
Until 2022, the city will be cut off from access roads to it by car and it will remain more abandoned than ever, The Travel reports.
However, the remaining residents won a legal battle with the authorities in 2013 to remain there, despite attempts to relocate them - and to all the tourists who do make their way to Centralia, they are careful to remind that it is still not quite a ghost town.
The graffiti road
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The state has confirmed that the fire can continue to burn for another century, with others estimating that it could take hundreds of years before it finally extinguishes itself.
As of last September, at least 259 fires had started in underground mines in more than a dozen states, according to the federal Office of Surface Mining, but some researchers believe there may have been thousands more coal mine fires that are not known or reported.
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