July 15, 2020 • 14 mins
An old coal mine in Pennsylvania caught fire one day in the 60s and it’s been burning ever since. What’s crazy is this happens all the time.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, you welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.
We're Josh where Juck doesn't matter. And this is stuff
you should know? Is it short stuff? Yeah? Short stuff
you should know. Man, my mind, Chuck, You're right. No, Okay,
let's continue. Okay, we're talking about Centralia. Yeah, which we've
(00:27):
talked about before. I don't know if it was in
an Abandoned Places episode or I think that I don't
remember what else we would have talked about it in.
But we have definitely talked about it. Yeah, unless we
talked about Cole maybe, but um that that's the then
diagram of abandoned places and coal uh Sits Centralia, Pennsylvania,
(00:50):
the very smallest municipality in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and
it is a former mining community a couple of hours
northwest of phil Lee. That there was always a small town,
a small mining town it. I think it only had
about four hundred people there in the early nineteen sixties,
but now there are less than ten people for one
(01:12):
very scary reason. And what is that. Well, the scary
reason is that when you're walking around Centralia, the earth
may open up and swallow you into a fiery pit
at any given moment without anyone. Yeah, how's that good
way to say it? Thank you? Uh yeah, So what's
what happened, Well, we don't know exactly what happened. There's
(01:36):
a few different versions of this story that will go
over in a second, but the end result of each
of these stories is that in nineteen sixty two, there
is uh still burning from that year a coal seam
fire literally coal on fire underground under Centralia in the
(01:58):
surrounding area of Centralia, Pennsylvania, right, which is I mean,
that's a very alarming thing because I think any person
who hears that says, well, how would you put one
of those out? And the answer to that is, by
the time it's been burning for seventy years, you don't
burns itself out. And then an average reasonable person would
(02:19):
be like, wait, wait, well there's a lot of coal underground.
Can it just keep burning like indefinitely? And the answer
to that reasonable person is absolutely so. Uh. These seams
um are naturally occurring coal deposits. They're called seams in
the industry. Uh. They're sort of like veins that run
through the earth that are made of coal, and they
(02:42):
can It's it's not like this is a rare thing.
Coal seam fires happen a lot, and can happen all
over and do happen all over the world. I had
no idea. I mean, I've known about centrally as fire
for many, many years, but I had no idea that
this is a very common thing. It's very alarming. Really, Centralia,
what did I say? You said to Centralia? And you
(03:04):
don't want to anger those ten people. Uh, it's like
saying Nevada. Which way? Do they not like it? They say,
only people in Nevada call it Nevada? Okay, Yeah, everybody
else calls it Nevada. Really makes them mad. I don't
want to do that to the people of good people
of Centralia, altend of them. So I'm just gonna call
(03:25):
it c Town then to cover my basis. Yeah, okay,
because now if I if I just spend time thinking
about it, it'll just totally derail this whole episode. Let's
go back to coal seam fire. So they're very common,
Like you said, apparently in China, um something like, well,
(03:45):
there's a three thousand miles stretch of a coal mining
belt around China, and I guess at any given time,
a pretty decent proportion of it is on fire with
these coal seam fires, which is problematic. There's a town
in India called jahari H and it has had a
coal seam fire going on since nineteen eighteen and has
lost something like forty one million tons of coal to
(04:08):
this fire just up and smoke quite literally. Yeah. Uh,
obviously this happens more often if the miners didn't do
the right thing when they left. So like they're down
there mining and they've got these tunnels and you've got
to take care of that stuff when you leave. You
can't just say all right, we're out of here and
put the confishient sign out front. Well, unfortunately a lot
(04:31):
of mine owners have done that for a very long time. Yeah,
absolutely so. Um, if you don't have like the right supports,
uh to keep the ground from collapsing, that can be
a fire risk as well. Get a film in I
saw also chuck that. Um. There's this company that developed
(04:52):
what they call a cellular foam. It's actually a mixture
of Portland's cement and fly ash, which is a very
difficult ways to get rid of and so my their
stuff and it's a foam you can spray on whatever
coals left over um and it will prevent this fire
from these fires from catching, which is a really great thing.
And also it gets rid of like I said, that
(05:12):
fly waste or fly ash waste, that's that's tough to
um remediate on its own. So you're killing two birds
with one stone. But one of the reasons that you
would want to seal off whatever coal seam is left
after you abandon the mind is because it's not just
dipstick humans who set coal seam fires like they can
(05:34):
happen quite naturally too. And then because that's a very
tantalizing thing to say, I suggest, Chuck that we take
an am break right now. All right, let's do it
(06:08):
all right now? Is the payoff everybody. Coal seam fires
can start under natural circumstances, go, Chuck, Yeah, they are.
They can even spontaneously combust. Uh. And once they get going,
especially this anthracite coal, it is very very hard to
put out. Um produces a lot of heat, and that
(06:30):
that's self heat. It it just sort of is a
cyclical thing. It just sort of stays on fire. And
that's why when you're shipping coal, uh, it's you know,
it's dangerous to ship coal when they get all those
big steamerships. It's dangerous, yeah, because the the as the
coal oxidizes, I think Piet Pie write um inside the
(06:52):
coal as it oxidizes, it starts to heat up. So
the coal can heat up from inside out, and it
can get hot enough that it can actually self ignite
spontaneously combust like you were saying, So, imagine having like
a tanker ship full of coal and your sailor on
that ship, and you are fully aware that coal can
(07:14):
spontaneously ignite. Wouldn't you be nervous? That'd be a little
nerve breaking, especially because so you know that that ship
is on fire in San Diego, the Navy ship right now, right,
and they were saying that it's reaching temperatures of about
a thousand degrees fahrenheit and it was melting steel. It
was that hot. Well, friend, that coal seam fire in Centralia,
(07:36):
Did I say it right? Centralia? Man Um. It has
been shown to reach at least temperatures of fifty degrees
which is something like seven two degrees celsius. So if
that happened on your ship, it would definitely burn a
hole right through your ship and you would be sunk
down to Davy Jones locker. Yeah, so how this thing starts? Did?
(08:00):
There are a few different versions. Um, my money is
on probably the most popular version, which was on sixty
two they burned a landfill on purpose. This was something
that that you know, would happen regularly as you would
burn the trash literally and that this trash burn kind
(08:20):
of got into that coal seam and boom, there you
have it, and it started a fire that has never
been put out to this day. Um. Other versions of
the story was that it was another garbage fire and
not that one on let by a truck driver. Uh.
And then another one is that it started in the
(08:41):
nineteen thirties I think and has just been around, and
then in the nineteen sixties it was kind of noticed
for the first time. I like that one myself. Oh yeah, yeah.
The idea that it was kind of smoldering and then
all of a sudden, you know, maybe a flapper through
there cigarette I could totally see that. Sure, that might
(09:03):
be sexist though, so let's just say it could have
been a flapper or a boy toy. Okay. Either way, though,
that thing caught on fire started sweeping through those tunnels. Um,
we're talking a hundred to three hundred feet down below.
The earth is still on fire. You can still see
(09:24):
it today. There's some cool little short version YouTube documentaries
where news crews have gone out and stuff about Centralia,
and on rainy days, you just you stand there, especially
on rainy days, and you just see that steam and
smoke coming out from the earth itself. Um, which is
why one reason why it gave rise to the video
(09:45):
game and then later on the movie Silent Hill. It's
just this creepy abandoned town. Although the astounding thing is
that it's not fully abandoned, like you said, there are
some people. They're still. I think there's ten people that
live there still, and they live there because they basically
said I'm not moving. And so the government of Pennsylvania
finally said, fine, you you guys, you lifelong residents of
(10:06):
original residents of Centralia, you can stay here until you
and what you say in chill, I said, Centralia, Centralia again.
I don't care. I don't care anymore. I'm sorry, I'm
sorry people of c Town. I'm mispronouncing your name. I'm
offending ten people right now. Well, the government tried to
(10:26):
get them out of there. Um, they took away their
zip code in two thousand two. They were like, sorry,
no zip code. Uh. I don't know if they were
like we need that for somewhere else or we're just
retiring it. It's a big burn, no pun intended. They
took away Route sixty one or part of it. At
least it ran through there, and some people say it's
(10:49):
closed for other other people say like it could reopen
again one day. I don't think it will. Know who
says it could reopen one day, that's ridiculous. And one
of those documentaries and like, you know, the idea was
if this and gets under control, they could rebuild the
road and no Centralie one reason why they decided to
move everybody out of there, and it was done with
taxpayer funded basically like moving fund everyone has given a pope. Well,
(11:15):
the reason why they started moving everybody think in the
early eighties some kid was playing in one of the
streets and the street just collapsed under him and he
was hanging by his fingers above this like burning pit
that he was about to drop into, and they're like, okay,
I don't think Centralie is safe to live in. That
was forty years ago, so the town has done nothing
but get more unstable since then, so that at the
(11:38):
very least that highway is not opening back up. They've
also demolished buildings there too. You know what actually happened
to that kid? What is he went to investigate some smoke, uh,
and the thing exploded and shot him fifty ft up
into the air. I think it was a different kid,
was it? I don't know? And like the idea that
(12:00):
I got something wrong, man, And it just so happened
to be on the same day that a bunch of
news crews and local politicians were there, and that was
not a good look at all. The kid lived by
the way, Well, the kid lived in my version too. Yeah,
that's good. They've tried a bunch of things over the
(12:21):
years to extinguish it. They put vent pipes in in
the eighties, and the idea there was not to put
out the fire, but to direct these noxious gases because
you know, there's all kinds of nasty stuff being put
into the air, to vent those at least away from
the town. And some people said that's not working, and
(12:42):
in fact it's feeding the fire with oxygen. So they
sealed them up a right, So where does that leave us? Chuck. Well,
they've also tried to put it out altogether. They dug
it's sort of like a firebreak. They dug a trent
down to try and reach that seam in front of
(13:02):
the fire, but the fire went so fast they didn't
go far enough ahead. It beat them to where they
were digging down and they just went nuts. Right, But
apparently that's like, um, that's kind of par for the course.
Like that. You they're just really tough to put out.
You can kind of understand how that would be the
case from from what I've read. You have to stay
(13:26):
on top of it immediately after you noticed this and
then continue monitoring it basically indefinitely, because it can just
keep flaring up. And in fact, there's a there's something
called burning mountain Mount Wingin or Winging in New South Wales,
Australia that they think has been burning for six thousand
years now. Really yeah, really, man, Well that's scary stuff.
(13:51):
I think so too. But that was a good one,
don't you think I think it was great? Great? Well,
we hope that you think the same thing too. And
since we've run out of stuff to talk about about Centralia,
uh short, stuff is out. Stuff you should Know is
a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
(14:12):
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Hey, you welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.
We're Josh where Juck doesn't matter. And this is stuff
you should know? Is it short stuff? Yeah? Short stuff
you should know. Man, my mind, Chuck, You're right. No, Okay,
let's continue. Okay, we're talking about Centralia. Yeah, which we've
(00:27):
talked about before. I don't know if it was in
an Abandoned Places episode or I think that I don't
remember what else we would have talked about it in.
But we have definitely talked about it. Yeah, unless we
talked about Cole maybe, but um that that's the then
diagram of abandoned places and coal uh Sits Centralia, Pennsylvania,
(00:50):
the very smallest municipality in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and
it is a former mining community a couple of hours
northwest of phil Lee. That there was always a small town,
a small mining town it. I think it only had
about four hundred people there in the early nineteen sixties,
but now there are less than ten people for one
(01:12):
very scary reason. And what is that. Well, the scary
reason is that when you're walking around Centralia, the earth
may open up and swallow you into a fiery pit
at any given moment without anyone. Yeah, how's that good
way to say it? Thank you? Uh yeah, So what's
what happened, Well, we don't know exactly what happened. There's
(01:36):
a few different versions of this story that will go
over in a second, but the end result of each
of these stories is that in nineteen sixty two, there
is uh still burning from that year a coal seam
fire literally coal on fire underground under Centralia in the
(01:58):
surrounding area of Centralia, Pennsylvania, right, which is I mean,
that's a very alarming thing because I think any person
who hears that says, well, how would you put one
of those out? And the answer to that is, by
the time it's been burning for seventy years, you don't
burns itself out. And then an average reasonable person would
(02:19):
be like, wait, wait, well there's a lot of coal underground.
Can it just keep burning like indefinitely? And the answer
to that reasonable person is absolutely so. Uh. These seams
um are naturally occurring coal deposits. They're called seams in
the industry. Uh. They're sort of like veins that run
through the earth that are made of coal, and they
(02:42):
can It's it's not like this is a rare thing.
Coal seam fires happen a lot, and can happen all
over and do happen all over the world. I had
no idea. I mean, I've known about centrally as fire
for many, many years, but I had no idea that
this is a very common thing. It's very alarming. Really, Centralia,
what did I say? You said to Centralia? And you
(03:04):
don't want to anger those ten people. Uh, it's like
saying Nevada. Which way? Do they not like it? They say,
only people in Nevada call it Nevada? Okay, Yeah, everybody
else calls it Nevada. Really makes them mad. I don't
want to do that to the people of good people
of Centralia, altend of them. So I'm just gonna call
(03:25):
it c Town then to cover my basis. Yeah, okay,
because now if I if I just spend time thinking
about it, it'll just totally derail this whole episode. Let's
go back to coal seam fire. So they're very common,
Like you said, apparently in China, um something like, well,
(03:45):
there's a three thousand miles stretch of a coal mining
belt around China, and I guess at any given time,
a pretty decent proportion of it is on fire with
these coal seam fires, which is problematic. There's a town
in India called jahari H and it has had a
coal seam fire going on since nineteen eighteen and has
lost something like forty one million tons of coal to
(04:08):
this fire just up and smoke quite literally. Yeah. Uh,
obviously this happens more often if the miners didn't do
the right thing when they left. So like they're down
there mining and they've got these tunnels and you've got
to take care of that stuff when you leave. You
can't just say all right, we're out of here and
put the confishient sign out front. Well, unfortunately a lot
(04:31):
of mine owners have done that for a very long time. Yeah,
absolutely so. Um, if you don't have like the right supports,
uh to keep the ground from collapsing, that can be
a fire risk as well. Get a film in I
saw also chuck that. Um. There's this company that developed
(04:52):
what they call a cellular foam. It's actually a mixture
of Portland's cement and fly ash, which is a very
difficult ways to get rid of and so my their
stuff and it's a foam you can spray on whatever
coals left over um and it will prevent this fire
from these fires from catching, which is a really great thing.
And also it gets rid of like I said, that
(05:12):
fly waste or fly ash waste, that's that's tough to
um remediate on its own. So you're killing two birds
with one stone. But one of the reasons that you
would want to seal off whatever coal seam is left
after you abandon the mind is because it's not just
dipstick humans who set coal seam fires like they can
(05:34):
happen quite naturally too. And then because that's a very
tantalizing thing to say, I suggest, Chuck that we take
an am break right now. All right, let's do it
(06:08):
all right now? Is the payoff everybody. Coal seam fires
can start under natural circumstances, go, Chuck, Yeah, they are.
They can even spontaneously combust. Uh. And once they get going,
especially this anthracite coal, it is very very hard to
put out. Um produces a lot of heat, and that
(06:30):
that's self heat. It it just sort of is a
cyclical thing. It just sort of stays on fire. And
that's why when you're shipping coal, uh, it's you know,
it's dangerous to ship coal when they get all those
big steamerships. It's dangerous, yeah, because the the as the
coal oxidizes, I think Piet Pie write um inside the
(06:52):
coal as it oxidizes, it starts to heat up. So
the coal can heat up from inside out, and it
can get hot enough that it can actually self ignite
spontaneously combust like you were saying, So, imagine having like
a tanker ship full of coal and your sailor on
that ship, and you are fully aware that coal can
(07:14):
spontaneously ignite. Wouldn't you be nervous? That'd be a little
nerve breaking, especially because so you know that that ship
is on fire in San Diego, the Navy ship right now, right,
and they were saying that it's reaching temperatures of about
a thousand degrees fahrenheit and it was melting steel. It
was that hot. Well, friend, that coal seam fire in Centralia,
(07:36):
Did I say it right? Centralia? Man Um. It has
been shown to reach at least temperatures of fifty degrees
which is something like seven two degrees celsius. So if
that happened on your ship, it would definitely burn a
hole right through your ship and you would be sunk
down to Davy Jones locker. Yeah, so how this thing starts? Did?
(08:00):
There are a few different versions. Um, my money is
on probably the most popular version, which was on sixty
two they burned a landfill on purpose. This was something
that that you know, would happen regularly as you would
burn the trash literally and that this trash burn kind
(08:20):
of got into that coal seam and boom, there you
have it, and it started a fire that has never
been put out to this day. Um. Other versions of
the story was that it was another garbage fire and
not that one on let by a truck driver. Uh.
And then another one is that it started in the
(08:41):
nineteen thirties I think and has just been around, and
then in the nineteen sixties it was kind of noticed
for the first time. I like that one myself. Oh yeah, yeah.
The idea that it was kind of smoldering and then
all of a sudden, you know, maybe a flapper through
there cigarette I could totally see that. Sure, that might
(09:03):
be sexist though, so let's just say it could have
been a flapper or a boy toy. Okay. Either way, though,
that thing caught on fire started sweeping through those tunnels. Um,
we're talking a hundred to three hundred feet down below.
The earth is still on fire. You can still see
(09:24):
it today. There's some cool little short version YouTube documentaries
where news crews have gone out and stuff about Centralia,
and on rainy days, you just you stand there, especially
on rainy days, and you just see that steam and
smoke coming out from the earth itself. Um, which is
why one reason why it gave rise to the video
(09:45):
game and then later on the movie Silent Hill. It's
just this creepy abandoned town. Although the astounding thing is
that it's not fully abandoned, like you said, there are
some people. They're still. I think there's ten people that
live there still, and they live there because they basically
said I'm not moving. And so the government of Pennsylvania
finally said, fine, you you guys, you lifelong residents of
(10:06):
original residents of Centralia, you can stay here until you
and what you say in chill, I said, Centralia, Centralia again.
I don't care. I don't care anymore. I'm sorry, I'm
sorry people of c Town. I'm mispronouncing your name. I'm
offending ten people right now. Well, the government tried to
(10:26):
get them out of there. Um, they took away their
zip code in two thousand two. They were like, sorry,
no zip code. Uh. I don't know if they were
like we need that for somewhere else or we're just
retiring it. It's a big burn, no pun intended. They
took away Route sixty one or part of it. At
least it ran through there, and some people say it's
(10:49):
closed for other other people say like it could reopen
again one day. I don't think it will. Know who
says it could reopen one day, that's ridiculous. And one
of those documentaries and like, you know, the idea was
if this and gets under control, they could rebuild the
road and no Centralie one reason why they decided to
move everybody out of there, and it was done with
taxpayer funded basically like moving fund everyone has given a pope. Well,
(11:15):
the reason why they started moving everybody think in the
early eighties some kid was playing in one of the
streets and the street just collapsed under him and he
was hanging by his fingers above this like burning pit
that he was about to drop into, and they're like, okay,
I don't think Centralie is safe to live in. That
was forty years ago, so the town has done nothing
but get more unstable since then, so that at the
(11:38):
very least that highway is not opening back up. They've
also demolished buildings there too. You know what actually happened
to that kid? What is he went to investigate some smoke, uh,
and the thing exploded and shot him fifty ft up
into the air. I think it was a different kid,
was it? I don't know? And like the idea that
(12:00):
I got something wrong, man, And it just so happened
to be on the same day that a bunch of
news crews and local politicians were there, and that was
not a good look at all. The kid lived by
the way, Well, the kid lived in my version too. Yeah,
that's good. They've tried a bunch of things over the
(12:21):
years to extinguish it. They put vent pipes in in
the eighties, and the idea there was not to put
out the fire, but to direct these noxious gases because
you know, there's all kinds of nasty stuff being put
into the air, to vent those at least away from
the town. And some people said that's not working, and
(12:42):
in fact it's feeding the fire with oxygen. So they
sealed them up a right, So where does that leave us? Chuck. Well,
they've also tried to put it out altogether. They dug
it's sort of like a firebreak. They dug a trent
down to try and reach that seam in front of
(13:02):
the fire, but the fire went so fast they didn't
go far enough ahead. It beat them to where they
were digging down and they just went nuts. Right, But
apparently that's like, um, that's kind of par for the course.
Like that. You they're just really tough to put out.
You can kind of understand how that would be the
case from from what I've read. You have to stay
(13:26):
on top of it immediately after you noticed this and
then continue monitoring it basically indefinitely, because it can just
keep flaring up. And in fact, there's a there's something
called burning mountain Mount Wingin or Winging in New South Wales,
Australia that they think has been burning for six thousand
years now. Really yeah, really, man, Well that's scary stuff.
(13:51):
I think so too. But that was a good one,
don't you think I think it was great? Great? Well,
we hope that you think the same thing too. And
since we've run out of stuff to talk about about Centralia,
uh short, stuff is out. Stuff you should Know is
a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
(14:12):
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
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